I was asked to install the parallel ice sheet model (PISM) by one of our researches. PISM is modern high-order physics ice sheet model that is written in C++ and uses MPI and PETSc. All our Linux machines are LCFG managed Scientific Linux 7 machines. PISM is built from source …

Providing secure, reliable, performant file storage is one of the fundamental services an IT team provides. This post describes in detail how the new CephFS based storage at the School of GeoSciences works. All our Linux machines, servers, compute boxes and desktops are running Scientific Linux and are managed using …

I went to an excellent panel discussion on AI biases, failures and fairness hosted by the University of Edinburgh. This presentations and the following discussion was very interesting, although I think it didn't quite hit the spot I was looking for. A lot of the discussion was on biases. Biases …

So we are going on strike again. In addition to the pension dispute which is still not resolved, we are also striking for better pay, working conditions, workload and the gender pay gap. Both issues are hugely important. But at the same time, it is ridiculous that they need to …

Day 1 The conference started with a keynote by Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM UK Chief Technology Officer, on IoT, AI and Quantum Computing. The talk was very much fun. Although I must say I am still not convinced by IoT and I am somewhat worried by AI. The issue of needing …

I went to very interesting talk by Howard Covington from the Alan Turing Institute on Glimpsing our AI Future at the Bayes Centre, University of Edinburgh. The talk was very interesting albeit short on technical detail and maybe somewhat worrying. This is a summary of what stuck in my mind …

The FLOSSUK conference was held in Edinburgh last week. I attended the two day conference and the hacking the raspberry pi workshop. The conference was excellent. Abstracts of all talks are on the FLOSSUK website. What follows are some notes from the talks I particularly liked. Reproducible Build Talk by …

We are now halfway through the 14 day strike over changes to our pension scheme. A further 14 days of strike are on the table depending on the progress of the negotiations between the union, the employers and the pension fund. At the centre of the dispute are different views …

Yesterday we had a big gradschool forum where the future of the GradSchool Conference was discussed. This post repeats and expands my initial thoughts yesterday. I work at the School of GeoSciences which is at the triple intersection of traditional geo-sciences (ie if you want to be provocative supplying talent …