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tcpipFour days of conference has come to end, starting with the relatively light Carpentry Connect NZ, which was basically the various educators and trainers involved in the software carpentries programme in NZ. About half the day was directly associated with co-ordinating people involved in the various organisations and their programmes, and half was some rather fun and indirectly practical improvisation games - and even with a nod of recognition to roleplaying games. I found myself quickly helping out with the curriculum for Genomics Aotearoa, mainly because I have already written such a course, and offering to help fix the HPC Carpentry, which is in dire need of such assistance.
Following that was the programme proper. I quite liked the opening keynote by Rosie Hicks and in the afternoon of the first day gave a short presentation about the Spartan HPC system in the cloud compute session and its relationship with the NeCTAR research cloud (as well as mentioning the University of Freiburg approach, all part of previous publications). On the following day I mainly got stuck into discussions about the use of Singularity containers in HPC and reminded people of how one can use EasyBuild to make Singularity containers. Blair Bethwaite ran a two-part workshop on the topic which should be converted into a course at UniMelb as well. On that note, today's presentation included an inspiring piece by Jo Lane on how the University of Waikato has introduced a postgraduate Scientific Supercomputing course on the good basis that they were tired of having the subject in the "shadow curriculum".
The conference dinner was at Lanarch Castle which is still charming, despite my multiple visits to this folly. I do take some macabre delight in with the gothic tale of romance and horror. There was a fair bit of Scottish regalia during the evening, including a recitation of Robert Burns' Address to a Haggis. I think it was performed by the same person who did it at the last eResearchNZ dinner in Dunedin, about ten years ago! Also speaking was one Ian Griffin, director of the Otago Museum and spotter of Aurora Australis and has some superb footage of such events (including the SOFIA flight). Anyway, given that his preferred photography spot (a jetty) is no more, I've offered the roof of my Masonic Lodge. The fact that he also has terabytes of unprocessed footage that needs some computational power is also a happy coincidence. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Also during the past few days, I made my way to visit the Otago University Roleplaying Society for my annual visit. We played Shadow Hunters, a rather interesting game of membership to secret factions and secret victory conditions, combining both co-operative and competitive elements. With my plentiful spare time, I have managed to make two submissions on my MSc dissertation, with another pending as the February 29 deadline approaches. Absolutely fascinated by the trends analysis I've conducted on the degree that open-source licensed software has made inroads in even personal devices and not just the server space. Finally, a Facebook group I started is now featured in The Guardian. Yes, it's that little brown rat again. I cannot help but feel a little bit of pride that this is actually happening in a substantive manner.
Following that was the programme proper. I quite liked the opening keynote by Rosie Hicks and in the afternoon of the first day gave a short presentation about the Spartan HPC system in the cloud compute session and its relationship with the NeCTAR research cloud (as well as mentioning the University of Freiburg approach, all part of previous publications). On the following day I mainly got stuck into discussions about the use of Singularity containers in HPC and reminded people of how one can use EasyBuild to make Singularity containers. Blair Bethwaite ran a two-part workshop on the topic which should be converted into a course at UniMelb as well. On that note, today's presentation included an inspiring piece by Jo Lane on how the University of Waikato has introduced a postgraduate Scientific Supercomputing course on the good basis that they were tired of having the subject in the "shadow curriculum".
The conference dinner was at Lanarch Castle which is still charming, despite my multiple visits to this folly. I do take some macabre delight in with the gothic tale of romance and horror. There was a fair bit of Scottish regalia during the evening, including a recitation of Robert Burns' Address to a Haggis. I think it was performed by the same person who did it at the last eResearchNZ dinner in Dunedin, about ten years ago! Also speaking was one Ian Griffin, director of the Otago Museum and spotter of Aurora Australis and has some superb footage of such events (including the SOFIA flight). Anyway, given that his preferred photography spot (a jetty) is no more, I've offered the roof of my Masonic Lodge. The fact that he also has terabytes of unprocessed footage that needs some computational power is also a happy coincidence. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Also during the past few days, I made my way to visit the Otago University Roleplaying Society for my annual visit. We played Shadow Hunters, a rather interesting game of membership to secret factions and secret victory conditions, combining both co-operative and competitive elements. With my plentiful spare time, I have managed to make two submissions on my MSc dissertation, with another pending as the February 29 deadline approaches. Absolutely fascinated by the trends analysis I've conducted on the degree that open-source licensed software has made inroads in even personal devices and not just the server space. Finally, a Facebook group I started is now featured in The Guardian. Yes, it's that little brown rat again. I cannot help but feel a little bit of pride that this is actually happening in a substantive manner.
