School of GeoSciences aptly package repository

The School of GeoSciences is running an aptly debian package repository. The following repositories are available: ubuntu ubuntu mirror inf informatics mirror uoe UoE package repository with component uoe world world package repository with component world geos School of GeoSciences repository with component geos All repositories and mirrors are available …

Anatomy of a CephFS Disaster

This post describes in detail how we ended up with a damaged CephFs and our attempts to fix it. Background On 3rd September we scheduled some downtime to reconfigure the network of our ceph cluster. Prior to that we used two networks: one frontend network used by the ceph clients …

Using Singularity to containerise a Scientific Model

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 …

School of GeoSciences File Storage

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 …

Machines with Error

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 …

Research Software Engineering Conference, Birmingham 2019

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 …

The Future of GradSchool Conference

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 …