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Supercomputing and Affirmation
Oct. 27th, 2025 08:49 pmEvery so often, there is a slight glimmer of light in my world where my usual state of driven dysthymia changes due to the affirming words and actions of others. Such an experience occurred last Friday when I organised a researcher tech talk with Dr Tomasz Wozniak, a senior lecturer in economics at UniMelb. Tomasz has recently been published, as part of an international team, in a Bank of Canada paper and in the prestiguous Journal of Econometrics on Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) and time-series models that analyse the relationships between multiple economic variables to identify and isolate the effects of exogenous economic shocks. It's actually important stuff to keep people in jobs when (for example) there's a massive negative disruption to trade (hello, US tariffs).
Tomasz had been kind enough to provide a repository of his presentation, which also points out that in the course of his research and his use of Spartan he has become an editor of the R Journal and developed the R packages, bsvars, bsvarSIGNs, and bpvars. He had many extremely positive comments to make about Spartan, both in terms of the infrastructure that we offer and the support that we provide to researchers. Two comments particularly stood out; first was the effects of our optimisation of the software that we build from the source code, especially (in his case) the GNU compiler suite and the R programming language. As a result of our optimised installs, he reported that his jobs would run four times faster on Spartan compared to his own machine, despite the fact that he had faster processors. Further, he mentioned that a few years ago, after attending one of my introductory training sessions, he learned the advantages of using job arrays instead of a looping logic. Suddenly, his computational improvements were hundreds of times faster than what would be the case on his own system; we call it "high performance computing" for a reason.
This is hardly the first time that this has happened. For every dollar invested in high performance computing, the estimated social return on investment $44 per dollar invested (in Japan, for example, it's c$75:1 due to alignment with national objectives). In a world where so many are in well-paid "bullshit jobs" whilst other struggle as part of the precariat class with low-paid insecure work, I have been fortunate enough to find a career that has stability and fair renumeration, interesting and challenging work, and actually produces socially useful outcomes. For almost twenty years, I have believed this with utter sincerity, but it is still very pleasing when the affirmation comes from others.
Tomasz had been kind enough to provide a repository of his presentation, which also points out that in the course of his research and his use of Spartan he has become an editor of the R Journal and developed the R packages, bsvars, bsvarSIGNs, and bpvars. He had many extremely positive comments to make about Spartan, both in terms of the infrastructure that we offer and the support that we provide to researchers. Two comments particularly stood out; first was the effects of our optimisation of the software that we build from the source code, especially (in his case) the GNU compiler suite and the R programming language. As a result of our optimised installs, he reported that his jobs would run four times faster on Spartan compared to his own machine, despite the fact that he had faster processors. Further, he mentioned that a few years ago, after attending one of my introductory training sessions, he learned the advantages of using job arrays instead of a looping logic. Suddenly, his computational improvements were hundreds of times faster than what would be the case on his own system; we call it "high performance computing" for a reason.
This is hardly the first time that this has happened. For every dollar invested in high performance computing, the estimated social return on investment $44 per dollar invested (in Japan, for example, it's c$75:1 due to alignment with national objectives). In a world where so many are in well-paid "bullshit jobs" whilst other struggle as part of the precariat class with low-paid insecure work, I have been fortunate enough to find a career that has stability and fair renumeration, interesting and challenging work, and actually produces socially useful outcomes. For almost twenty years, I have believed this with utter sincerity, but it is still very pleasing when the affirmation comes from others.
