A Week Of Science

It's been a very full week of a working holiday in Townsville teaching high performance computing, parallel programming, and the like at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. There were about fifty or so researchers in attendance, mostly in person and a few online. Although we had an official programme that ran from 9 to 5, out-of-hours discussions pretty much took up the rest of the time; mostly on HPC work, marine science, climatology, and languages. These were mostly youthful and very smart and a switched-on group who were very engaged with the content throughout the week, and very keen on getting assistance for their specific problems. It was quite delightful watching the (relatively small) cluster rocket in usage over the week as soon as they were taught how to fine-tune and submit various parts of their job submissions, and I get the sense that although many are part of different research groups, they are all keen to build a community of HPC users. It was also great, I must mention, to spend time in the company of Geoff M., the tireless AIMS sysadmin whom I met there almost ten years ago, and Patrick L., a marine researcher who was also there on my first visit. Diego B., provided a powerful and driving force in getting this week organised and finally, I was quite charmed to discover that among the several Perth AIMS visitors, one Barbara R., was also at Murdoch University at the same time as myself and part of the SF club I started, MARS.

Buried in the institute's buildings I didn't get much of a chance to explore even the impressive natural surroundings of AIMS, although I did receive regular visits from the local wallabies and brush turkeys, and my on-site accomodation had more than a few geckos. A particularly large trapdoor spider was also in the vicinity which attracted a bit of attention. On the last day we finished early, so I was given a bit of a tour of some key parts of the facilities, including the "National Sea Simulator", the experimental coral reef growth labs and, of course, their data centre. No matter how often I visit such places, it never ceases to amaze me how relatively modestly such scientific research facilities are funded, how modestly the actual researchers themselves live, and how every spare dollar is spent not on keeping such facilities prettified, but rather on the science itself. I have nothing but complete respect for these people.