Scaw2006Day1SCAW2006, Day 16 April 2006 Spent the day running to and fro between wome and the Cape Town campus of the Cape Tech which was hosting SCAW2006. Kevin Naidoo (from UCT's computational chemistry group) gave the opening talk. Mostly it was just general overview for those new to clustering and the local community. However, it does seem that the CHPC (Centre for High-Performance Computing) may be housed at the CSIR building down the road from my flat! The following talk, by Albert Gazendam (from the CSIR's Meraka Institute) got down into some of the details of the process of setting up C4 (the CSIR Cluster Computing Centre) which has just purchased a 184 CPU (46 2x dual Opteron nodes) cluster from HP. Installation is happening in May and after that they'll actually be looking to run things on it. Judging by his question afterwards, the Sun representative seemed unhappy that the tender had gone to HP. :) I skipped the rest of the mornings talks to get some work done and returned for the talk on KAT (the Karoo Array Telescope). The speaker (Thomas Bennet, I think) was enthusiastic but the talk came across as largely oversell. It looks like it'll be at least 2008 until they have anything other than a small prototype system going, but maybe a project worth keeping an eye on anyway. The conference dinner took place in the evening at The Capetonian. We shared a table with two numerical physicists who do work on open quantum systems. Since the dinner had an unforgivable lack of warm caffeinated beverages we retired to the flat for after dinner chit-chat and late night playing around with Scientific Python's MPI module. |