Happy New Year

I hope everyone has a happy, fun and safe new year for all!

2010 was a good year for me, I changed jobs back in January leaving the great people of VPAC for a new challenge, working with a new group of great people to bring up a new HPC centre for life sciences from scratch based at the University of Melbourne (but open to all life scientists across the state). Since then we’ve brought up a 1088 core SGI Altix XE cluster (Intel Nehalem based), a 640 core IBM iDataplex cluster (again Nehalem) and an IBM Blue Gene/P with 8192 cores. This is just stage 1, the big systems are due to arrive in 2012! It’s been great fun and great to just be able to concentrate on running the HPC systems and not have to worry about anything else.

On a personal level life has also been great, my wonderful wife and I celebrated 10 years of marriage this December and look forward to many more! We’ve just had our longest amount of time off together since 2008 thanks to the university shutting down between Xmas and New Year and have spent it quietly pottering around the house and local area. Very relaxing!