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.
I am contracting at CHPC, and have
bloggedbefore 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.
There have been a number of countries, like
UAE
and
India
that have demanded access to encrypted communications of
Research-In-Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry smartphones. These efforts
are misguided, and unfairly target RIM’s business.
Public key encryption
We need a quick primer on today’s encryption. We pick the standard
scenario where Alice wants to talk to Bob, and Charlie is trying to
listen in.
In the old days Alice had to get a ‘secret’ to Bob before they can
chatter. This was vulnerable because there was always the possibility
that Charlie could intercept that initial exchange.
This is the new ’enemy’ - the indiscriminate information age. Even
during the case, wikileaks gave
its followers - 120 thousand and growing - a sharply-focused feed
into this continually-evolving situation.
Wikipedia is
there to helpfully keep the permanent record, written by the crowds, not
by chosen editors. We choose our own news these days - I don’t read what
just one editor says.
There I covered snail mail, fax, email, Usenet News and instant
messaging (AIM and others). Since then I have been blogging, and I have
stats on what people look at. My most popular posts appear to be those on
Zulu weddings, and my
visitto
the school where One Laptop per Child was launched in Nigeria.
Since then I learned IRC, (which you see below), which is a more
refined tool than the old unix “talk” where you just banged a message on
their screen. I like IRC, and especially the Cape Linux Users Group
IRCchatroom. A
busy linux users group, where we get together once in a while,either for
technical talks or Geek dinners. It is my first port of call if I am stuck
on some problem to do with programming or system administration.
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.
Wikimedia projects, including the flagship English Wikipedia, have
been restricted in access to people with internet access.
kiwix is opening that up, via its offline
reader.
I have blogged
before
about kiwix - this article is an effort to tell other people how to do
the same.
Kiwix is a cross-platform reader of zim
files. Zim is an open,
standardised file format to store Wiki content efficiently for offline
usage. It is compressed (LZMA), with fast resolution of inter-article
links. It is simple (one file), and optimised to run on really small
devices like phones.
I inherited a wireless setup of three Mikrotik routers in the roof of a
set of office suites in Cape Town, South Africa. They were connected to
an ADSL router, but the owners problem was there was no accountability on
usage.
Mikrotik
Mikrotik make a numberof
Single-board computers, known as “Routerboard"s, and licence a
proprietary operating system called RouterOS for use on these boards.
This was my first time to come across the Routerboards, and I like them.
I was asked in because Mikrotik specialists in Cape Town are hard to
find, and harder to schedule.
I was invited to participate in BBCWorld Service ‘Africa have your
say’
call-in programme to discuss Zuma’s request to Gordon Brown that
sanctions be lifted. I was given 30 seconds very near the end of the
programme, and I handled it poorly. This post is to make up for it :)
Kiwix, an offline wikipedia selection, is installed at Kwena Malapo school.
I have blogged before about
creating offline copies of wikipedia for use in school computer labs that
do not have internet access.
Wikimedia, the umbrella organisation behind wikipedia and other
related projects, is also keenly interested in offline uses of wikipedia.
From November through January, the
offline taskforce
had a series of IRC meetings where we attempted to answer questions
relating to the use of these offline copies. We came up with four
recommendations,
one of which addressed schools, and another cellphones.