The CHPC National conference took place in the first week of December, and it had some interesting talks. All the Videos are viewable on YouTube

https://www.chpcconf2021.co.za/

The last keynote was by Prof Thomas Sterling, of Indiana University, where in a wide-ranging retrospective of HPC technology, he talked at the end about :-

https://events.chpc.ac.za/event/98/contributions/1535/

• “A brief discussion of early attempts of memory-centric computing such as SIMD and PIM will motivate revolutionary concepts of the future. Questions from the audience will be welcome assuming remote communication technology permits.”

You can watch his presentation here.

The Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town has an annual meeting to showcase flagship projects and listen to other people’s experiences at similarcentres around the world.

The 7-9th December 2010 saw the Centre for High Performance Computing’s national meeting held at the Westin Grand hotel in Cape Town, next to the International convention centre, CTICC.

I am contracting at CHPC, and have blogged before about it.

Dr Happy Sithole is director of the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), an initiative funded by the Departmentof Science and Technology (DST) and managed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research(CSIR). He opened the Plenary session, discussing High Performance Computing and Data curation - the latter being slipped in as a target for the next big project at CHPC, a petabyte-scale database facility.

I have recently been contracting at the Centre for High Performance Computing. This is just an update on how to map the particular problem I have onto the computing cluster.

First steps

It is an explanation of how to get to the much easier job of splitting the main task up into bite-sized pieces that can be fed independently via a job submission system called MOAB.

Task description

Each day satellites MODIS(NASA) and MERIS (ESA) do afew passes of a polar orbit over our region of interest, African coastal andinland waters. The (large amounts) of daily data arrive via a dedicated satellite link - about 1 Gig every day. They are in “swaths”, about 20 or so files from 10Meg to 800Meg.

Last month I started a contracting job with the Marine Remote Sensing Unit - a collaboration between the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) and University of Cape Town.

I have some history in parallel processing, mostly with Inmos, a British microelectronics company that built the Transputer, a ground-breaking microprocessor of the 1980s. I had been looking for an opportunity to work at the CHPC for a while, and took the chance when an opening arrived via the clug-work mailing list run by the Cape Town Linux Users Group.