Hi, This afternoon NZCS had Peter Helms as guest speaker giving a presentation about the Blue Fern project at Canterbury University. Peter Helms is the director of the Blue Fern project.
The presentation was very interesting. There is a general knowledge that the biggest High Performance Computer (HPC) in Australasia is in Christchurch but was instructive to have an insight of what type of projects are run on it and what is it used for. It came as a surprise to me that both Blue Gene and the p575, the two super-computers that make the HPC architecture there, are running a linux kernel. Peter told me that they are keen to talk to other interested audiences about what they do there and what their plans for the future are. I will only say that they are keen to get the community involved in this project. So if there is interest from CLUG I can ask Peter or, if the interest is more technical, one of the engineers working on the project - Peter is not a technical person - to talk about what High Performance Computing is, what it is used for and how it is used at CU. Let me know what you think. There is also a site visit at CU organised for the 17th of March. Registration for this event will be required so they know numbers and more details about this event will come soon on the NZCS website, keep an eye on the Canterbury events page at http://www.nzcs.org.nz/tools/events/default.asp?SECT=canterbury Cheers, Adrian
