Posted on

Projects, Placements and Fun

Ceph Project

Work has continued on my Intern project, with the virtual cluster completed, I tested various different backup solutions to use with Ceph e.g. BackupPC and BorgBackup. I have also looked into benchmarking the Ceph cluster once installed using tools such as rados bench and fio. The Hard drives for the compute nodes have arrived for the cluster so the next stage will be installing the new hard drives into Viper’s compute nodes ready for the installation of Ceph. Continue reading “Projects, Placements and Fun”

Posted on

Write maintainable research code with these 3 weird tricks!

Writing code is not easy.

If you are a researcher and have to write code, especially if you are not from a computer science background, then I salute you.

I have spent the last 4 years (6 years if you include my time at the Open University) studying for an MEng in Software Engineering. I can tell you with certainty that it is not an easy task. I’d like to tell you about something that is even harder than writing code: Reading and maintaining poorly written code! Continue reading “Write maintainable research code with these 3 weird tricks!”

Posted on

My First Months Working on Viper

My First few months working on Viper have offered me great insight into the world of HPC, from system administration to coding.

When I was first introduced to Viper I was wowed by its size and the noise from the cooling fans, it is essential to wear ear defenders if you’re in the room for any length of time! When working on a PC in the command line, it’s easy to feel detached from the fact that code/jobs are running on Viper! Continue reading “My First Months Working on Viper”

Posted on

HPC Internships

Working in High Performance Computing is one of the most interesting and rewarding roles in IT. Not only does it give you the opportunity to play with some of the latest (and biggest) technology there is, but you also get chance to work closely with researchers at the forefront of their field. HPC is a very specialist area to work in, yet requiring a wide range of skills. However it is a role where you do feel you can make a real contribution to the way researchers work. Continue reading “HPC Internships”