Lev Lafayette's journal

The last week was spent in Sydney for Supercomputing Asia 2024, overlooking Darling Harbour with some impressive storms that made me feel good about being inside. With over 1,000 attendees it is obviously smaller than Supercomputing (US) or the International Supercomputing Conference (Germany, my preferred choice), but there was a very good sense of intimacy at this size. Conferences of this sort do have their share of high-level presentations along with some managerial-level buzzwords of where they think the industry is heading, which are sometimes less true than they would like the dollars to follow. "Artificial intelligence" and "quantum computing" were two particularly notable phrases this year, although with regard to the latter, I do note that more careful minds point out the difference between quantum computing (typically conducted on stock-standard HPC systems) and quantum computers (which are still, after many years, a bit of an experimental oddity at best).

The Conference was especially good for getting a sense of the power of some of the truly big iron. Representatives of the two largest systems, Frontier (no 1), Aurora (no 2), and Fugaku (no 4), were present. It is humbling to see systems that have more nodes than cores in the UniMelb system (which is no laggard), and pleasing to get a good grasp of the architecture. I was quietly pleased that my own comments about HPC microprocessor trends from 18 months ago were quite accurate, and I have a special nod to the Thai supercomputing centre which has really become an impressive national facility in its own right. A nice quirk of the conference was that the voice of Siri, Karen Jacobsen was the MC for the plenary sessions. There was, of course, the opportunity to talk to many vendors who are all doing some very interesting things and making plentiful offers, although I do note that there is often a pitch in favour of monopolisation ("we'll do everything for you") rather than interoperability.

For my own part, I presented a talk the "HPC Certification Forum: An Update", which was very well received (particularly the idea of using the skill tree as a teaching structure), and the poster "HPC Training Generates HPC Results". The evening hosted by Xenon at L'Aqua on Cockle Bay Wharf was very nice, and I happily managed to arrange a dinner to catch up with a few Sydney friends with John A., Julien G., Jiri B., and Adam B. all attending. Most importantly, however - as confirmed - HPC generates an enormous social return on investment, either in cost savings or new revenue. The current figure being quoted is around $77 per $1 funded - which makes it an ultimate infrastructure investment. Of course, the most recent pandemic is a case in point, and today I chaired the researcher meeting for Research Computing Services with Tom Karagiannis and team explaining how they built a massive database of antivirals for COVID-19 related molecular dynamics simulations. It is results like these that prove the worth of supercomputing; the infrastructure that touches and improves all our lives, and yet we can rarely notice.

Much of the past several days has been working on the final touches and printing edits required for Papers & Paychecks. The printers weren't getting my emails for whatever reason - but everything's been sorted following a 'phone call and new thread of emails. So hooray, after all these months the thing is finally off to print. And for that matter, when I haven't been doing Papers & Paychecks, I've been putting together the final pages on issue 35 and 36 of RPG Review. Appropriately I've had some good gaming days recently; Megatraveller last Wednesday, Eclipse Phase last weekend, and there was even a Cheesequest where we played Mice & Mystics, this time getting through chapter five with a minimum of fuss. Some work colleagues have coaxed me into running an RPG session at the end-of-year gathering; I've chosen to use the HeroQuest RPG rules (simple, easy to adapt), but the Eclipse Phase setting (transhumanism gone wrong).

Work continues to deal with the pointy-end of high perfomance computing. We're putting together a system which includes the latest kernel, the last NVidia drivers, the latest OFED, the latest OpenMPI, the latest Cumlus OS, the latest adapter cards, etc all with the great hope of pushing the system as a whole beyond the petaflop range. It's been a complex process and the staff have been doing some extraordinary work whilst at the same time poking various vendors on the bugs that we find along the journey. It's going to be quite a celebration when we iron these out and can bring users on to the new partition. In the meantime, a little introductory post I've been meaning to put up for a while: Rattus Norvegicus ESTs with BLAST and Slurm.

Apart from the aforementioned CheeseQuest with ser_pounce and hathhalla, caseopaya and I took nephew Luke out for his 27th birthday with his housemate Nick at the rather pleasant Sukho Thai restaurant last week. Today had Brendan E., and Paul E (founder of Polyester Books) over for lunch and a tour of the Willsmere grounds. Hadn't seen Paul for a number of years so the opportunity to catch up was very welcome. And a very unexpected catch-up ran into ozraptor4 who was visiting UniMelb as a waypoint from China for a fossil dig.