Lev Lafayette's journal

For the past six days or so I've been in Wellington for Multicore World which, as usual, is a small but very high-quality pointy-end-of-the-technology conference. Actually, it's almost a truism of technology conferences - the smaller the conference and the higher the proportion of international guests, the higher the quality. There were many good presentations, but one which really caught my attention was "Preparing for Extreme Heterogeneity in High Performance Computing" by Jeffrey Vetter, of Oak Ridge National Laboratories and Scaling! by Richard O'Keefe. My own presentation was Complex Problems Actually Have Complex Solutions which argued against some unfortunate management trends (and interestingly correlated with the emergent theme of heterogeneity) with plenty of New Zealand related references.

As would be quite well-known, February 18 was Bramble Cay Melomys Day, which was quite a success. The Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick gave a speech in parliament, several memorial events were held around the country (as can be seen on the Facebook group), the petition for a national memorial and museum for extinct and endangered animals is up and running, and I stood in the morning drizzle in Wellington to initiate proceedings for Australia (because I enjoy starting Australian things in New Zealand). This is, of course, not the end of events but rather the beginning,

Convention organiser Nicolás Erdödy has once again delivered a superb event at a great location and with amazing catering. I think I'll live on dry bread and water for a few days after this. After each day of the conference, I made by back to the delightfully scarred deco beauty that is Hotel Waterloo, which is brilliantly good-value for those who like this sort of style, and have worked on my MSc dissertation which has the title, Is the Future of Business Software Proprietary or Free and Open-Source?. Having completed the trend data collection and conducted interviews my conclusion is heading to the proposition that this is a race condition between engineering requirements and a natural marginal cost of reproduction versus the use of the cloud to achieve subscription-based vendor lock-in. On client-servers, I think the latter is winning. Anyway, all this said it means I haven't had the opportunity to really engage in the Wellington I know and love. No visits to the museums, or galleries, or even the observatory. The best I have managed is a catch-up lunch with mr_orgue, which was frankly great, as we hadn't seen each other for a couple of years. Anyway, following a rather awful sleep (or lack thereof), I'm about to board the big silver bird and cross The Ditch back to Australia.

Four 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.

It seems that I skipped my regular beginning-of-week journal entry, and it's not surprising either. Much of my time has been spent on "Project Melomys", a day initially inspired by First Dog on the Moon's cartoon about the first mammal extinction due to climate change. FDontM predicted that we would forget about the little brown rat but, as is my wont, I marked in my diary. Then Nevil.KingstonBrown made the remark that Australia needs a memorial for extinct and endangered animals, and the plan was hatched. On February 18 there will be a launch of a petition to the Australian Parliament to establish such a memorial and museum, and there will be gatherings around the country to remember the Bramble Cay Melomys. A Facebook group has been established, which has over two hundred members, and various MPs and environmental groups are being contacted every day. This little brown rat is getting some traction.

In the past several days I've also made two contributions to Rocknerd. On Sunday Andy Gill of the Gang of Four died. As the recipient of his guitar when he last performed in Melbourne it was only appropriate that I write up some valedictions to his many talents in musical performance, music production, and video production. A few days later, I posted a review of Grum's Deep State, which if nothing else indicates a diversity of taste and perhaps even good taste. To add some additional colour to the mix, have purchased tickets to see Pop Will Eat Itself and Snog. Currently thinking about getting the "meet and greet" tickets for China Crisis when they visit later this year.

On Sunday I take the big silver bird to New Zealand where I will "work from home" for the next two weeks. Starting in Dunedin I'll re-enroll for my second year of my MHEd at Otago University, meet up with my supervisor, and visit my secret South Pacific base to ensure that the new tenants are looking after the mystical Lodge. After that, it will workshops and conferences for eResearchNZ, where I've been co-opted to speak on a panel about cloud computing because you always need one curmudgeon nay-sayer. Also particularly interested in the workshop on use of Singularity containers on HPC. After that I'll travel to Wellington to attend and present at Multicore World, where I'll present on Complex Problems Actually Have Complex Solutions.