Lev Lafayette's journal

This week is eResearch Australasia, probably the most significant meeting of minds in the country of its sort. I have presented several times in the past at this annual conference, and this time I'll be speaking on the "The Spartan HPC Story: From Small Scale Experimental to Top500 and Beyond" which, as one fellow staff member quipped, is "a love letter to Spartan". There is some truth to this; I have watched Spartan grow over the past nine years from being just a plan on paper, raised in innovative poverty, and becoming one of the most significant systems on the planet with volumes of research output. Supercomputing is important, with a return of forty-four dollars in profits or cost-savings per dollar invested. There is not an area of modern technology or science that has supercomputing has not touched (could you imagine where we would be with COVID-19 without supercomputing?), and it pleases me a great deal to be deeply involved in this industry and academic pursuit.

But this is not the only academic pursuit of recent days. I have already started drafting a presentation on bioinformatics HPC education for EResearchNZ, which will be held in Christchurch early next year. Apropos more New Zealand matters, last week I attended the annual Wellington University Alumuni event (when you've graduated from several universities, you get to go to a few of these), where Professor Nick Long of the Robinson Research Institute spoke of their fascinating developments in superconductors (which NZ is a bit of world leader in) for fMRI, electric aviation and space vehicles, and even fusion power. Further, this week I have also finished two major assignments (two PhD reviews) for the subject International Academic Writing for my doctoral studies at Euclid University, and finally, I have started writing a paper on catatonia with Angela L (she's the subject expert, I'm merely a helpful wordsmith making use of his psychology degree).

Far from being a cloistered figure, this weekend's big trip was out to Bendigo with the Australa-China Friendship Society, where we caught up with members of the Bendigo Chinese Association who have done remarkable work in preserving and promoting that community's strong ties to the region of Dai Gum San (Big Gold Mountain). We visited the Golden Dragon Museum, the Kuan Yin Temple, Guan Yin Miao (temple of The Goddess of Mercy), Yi Yuan ("Garden of Joy"), and the Bendigo Joss Hoss Temple. The visit was so enjoyable and educational, and the local Chinese association was so helpful and friendly that I believe it will become an annual trip for the ACFS.

Today marks the EoY for work, another year in supercomputing. I can be pretty pleased with the final day's task; a researcher had 34 subjects with 100 optimisation runs across 40 variables. To run this in serial would have been somewhat time-consuming. With a combination of multiple job scrips, job arrays, and parallel loops with multiple cores, I think the computational task will have a c30000x speedup. I could possibly do more if the code refactored into a faster language and made use of GPUs. But that time isn't available, given the request came in yesterday! Still, it does serve as a valuable illustration of the sheer performance gains that can be achieved by decomposition, parallelisation, and job arrays in a high-performance computing environment. There's a reason our system has over 5000 users.

It's been an interesting year in my job; I achieved over and beyond stated expectations. I ran 26 workshops in high-performance computing, parallel programming, and the like, established a mentorship program for lead users in a dozen projects to further expand the training and education program, and gave guest lectures and tutorials for the course COMP90024 Cluster and Cloud Computing. I was the co-author of a chapter on secure shell in HPC environments. The HPC system was cited in at least 72 papers in the past year, mainly in genomics and related fields, and material engineering and fluid dynamics.

I attended three conferences and presented at eResearchNZ on the International HPC Certification Forum (which I remain on their Board), and wrote a background paper on Microprocesser Trends for HPC in 2022-23 (the work version had a lot more in-house information). I chaired work's Cultural Working Group which included organising a number of researcher presentations, and responses on mental health management (I also acquired a Mental Health First Aid certificate). All this on top of the usual tasks relating to HPC administration, job submission, software optimisation, and general advice to researchers on how to use the system. I'm rather looking forward to more of this next year, and I know I am fortunate to have a job that I enjoy, contributes something meaningful to the world, and provides good remuneration.

Settlement for my new apartment was on Friday, putting me in the frankly ridiculous situation of currently owning three places. Of course, I still have to move all my possessions and prepare the Willsmere house for sale, and I'm actually sufficiently cash poor at the moment that I can't do this right away (my conveyancing agent wanted their fees and stamp duty paid up-front, so that's $20K down the drain). Still, under our current law, buying is so much more sensible than renting if you have the up-front cash for a hefty deposit. Our housing and land system is so broken in favour of the landlord class, against new developments and renters, that it is almost always utterly irrational to rent as a matter of choice. All this could have changed for the better in the 2019 Federal election, but a campaign of fear, uncertainty, and doubt put an end to that. It's all a very illustrative example to me of what I utterly hate about politics - the irrationality and rejection of public welfare, the lies by vested interests and their ignorant allies, the power games - and the recognition of the utter necessity of engagement in it. It is all very well to have good relationships with your friends and build helpful communities, but all of that can be undone with a stroke of a pen and even greater welfare could be generated with the same pen. As Martin Luther King Jnr said: "What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic."

Whilst on the topic of love and while I should be happy with the new life ahead of me, the opposite is the case. I have been struck by a horrible experience of utter emptiness from correspondence earlier this week. In a continued streak of tumultuousness in affairs of the heart, it is again mia koramikino (as the Esperantists say). It has left me feeling utterly gutted, leaving but an empty shell of a person. The sculpture in Geneva, Melancholie by Albert Gyorgy, quite captures how I feel. I find it particularly poignant that the head is still attached; the thinking stoic mind separated from the visceral romantic body. However, a day after this correspondence, we had an old friend in the form of Rob L., visit. Rob runs a brewery and as an expert on such matters and brought over some local beers. It turned into "German night", as I cooked up kaese spaetzle and pfitzauf, and concluded the evening with mummelsee geist alcohol. It was lovely conversation, providing a sense of physical and social fullness, and yet one that contrasted so strongly with my emotional state. Naturally enough, I will write more about the latter, when I have composed myself.

I must conclude on a work event that I was responsible for organising; "Sam Blake and the Zodiac Mindwarp". Whilst it was restricted to staff of Research Computing Services and some selected researchers close to that body some notes can be provided about the event. Sam was part of small international team that cracked the 340 Cipher after fifty years by the Zodiac Killer, and some of that work was done the Spartan HPC system. I remember the news quite well because it's not every day that the system you work with effectively has a news embargo requested by the FBI! Sam's presentation did cover a range of issues in cryptography and the cipher in particular, along with the significant international coverage of the news, and illustrated a few example scripts that he used on the system. I pointed out very quickly with a few tweaks we could have made them run them a couple of orders of magnitude quicker. Who knew that communication could be so important even in technical fields? Anyway, there is future work that could be carried out and I hope to work a lot closer with Sam to see this to realisation.

Gaming sessions have returned back to normal with the return of Andrew D., from his Malaysia and UK holiday. Sunday was the regular session of Eclipse Phase. As is often the case, the first session sets the scene and this time it included the hatching of an Iktomi egg and contact by The Factors in Uranus. Wednesday was a session of Laundry Files which continued the explosive problem of a person in China being a nexus point between this world and fire vampires. Apropos have still be working on Papers & Paychecks with positive responses to the draft, perhaps the best being from NinjaDan, "this is looking like a real RPG sourcebook". Well, yes, that's the plan of course.

In other news items, there have been several mainstream news articles advocating land tax, following investigation by the Parliamentary Budget Office, as the Australian property market is in a bubble, with the proposed replacement of stamp duty with a broad land tax a fundamental and sensible policy. In related news there has several new 'blog posts on the Isocracy Network site, as well as a new article by Joe Toscano, The Four Horsemen of the 21st Century Apocalypse.

Finally, this afternoon gave a guest lecture at the University of Melbourne, for the course COMP90024 Cluster and Cloud Computing, on The Spartan HPC System at the University of Melbourne. Lectures like these are a tough gig; the four to six hour workshops and tutorials are at a slower pace with more direct involvement with the smaller number of participants. This is a much larger lecture, around two hundred postgraduate students, and with a lecture slot that lasts well over an hour there is a need to pack in as much information as possible. I am still not used to what I much presume is a millennial norm of applauding lecturers a the end of the class. This is normal now, right?

It's been quite a week; started off with a giving an introductory HPC class at the University of Melbourne with a particularly engaged an interested group of researchers on Monday, whom I found out later one was enthusiastically tweeting as the class went on. Thursday was the official launch of Spartan, the new HPC-Cloud hybrid, with over a hundred people in attendance and several speakers (including the Acting Vice-Chancellor). I gave a presentation on the architecture and technical side and have noted the widespread media coverage it has picked up, including sites like HPC Wire, Gizmodo, and Delimiter. Also, damn awesome luch afterwards. Next week I'm off to the Gold Coast for QuestNet.

Tomorrow is the Australian Federal election. Most opinion polls are predicting a close result on raw TPP votes, but with the Coalition leading in the key marginal electorates. I have giving a pessimistic reading of such analysis which also outlines what one can expect in the next three years (which has received some circulation on social media), with thesauce providing a item-by-item manifest of the atrocity exhibition that has made up this government. It all raises the question of deliberative and informed democracy, an issue which Brad Murray has explored with regards to Brexit.

It's also been a busy week in terms of gaming and the RPG Review Cooperative. My review of Vampire:The Masquerade was finally published on rpg.net, but on a much bigger scale, issue 30 of RPG Review has just been released, which includes an interview with Steve Kenson, reviews of several superhero RPGs, a superhero short story, a campaign world setting, organisations and characters, CRPG reviews, and two movie reviews. Appropriately Wednesday was a session of Godsend Agenda which dived right into the fictionalised version of the disasters confronting Marco Polo's return trip. Plus, the Cooperative has purchased ISBNs for member publications, thus completing every single objective that we set out to achieve at the start of the year - and we're only seven months in!