Blogs

Quantum Computing and Quantum Computers


It is appropriate, on World Quantum Day, to talk about quantum computing and quantum computers, as the two are often confused. Quantum computing is any method to generate quantum effects whereby qubit states can exist in superposition (0,1, both) rather than binary states (0,1). Binary states are represented in classical computing in low-level software as logical 0s and 1s but in hardware as high and low-voltage states.

The typical system to do quantum computing, or at least simulate it, is usually High Performance Computing (HPC). That works, it's a proven technology that has a rate of return of $44 per $1 invested - and higher when COVID research is considered. The development of HPC clusters with message passing is one of the most successful technological developments in computing in the last thirty years.

Scheduler Parallelisation

The standard computing model uses unithreaded instructions and data with automation through looping and conditional branching. Automation is encouraged as it results in the computer doing the work that it is designed for. However, this can be inefficient when using a multicore system. An alternative in HPC systems is to make use of job arrays, which use a job to allocate resources to sub-jobs which can be individually controlled, whether directed toward instruction sets or datasets.

New Order 20th Feb Canterbury Court

The presently touring New Order are a quite well-known alternative band, growing out of the legendary Joy Division, specializing in dance music with taints of Gothic gloom.

To date New Order have released four albums namely, "Movement", "Power, Corruption & Lies", "Low-Life" and now "Brotherhood" as well as a multitude of singles. The present tour coincides with the release of the new album "Brotherhood" and the single "Bizarre Love Triangle".

Lament: A Facebook Messenger JSON to HTML converter

Since 2016, Facebook Messenger has allowed the option for end-to-end encrypted messages, and in 2023, they were established as the default.

This has caused some issues with people exporting Messenger data for archival or viewing purposes. It is a lot quicker to search for information when the data is local, and it is better practice to do so.

eResearch New Zealand 2025 Summary

Aotearoa New Zealand has run eResearch symposiums and conferences since 2010, with the 2025 conference held in Christchurch, co-hosted with Genomics Aotearoa, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) and REANNZ. The first day, a "Carpentries Connect" event, was held at Canterbury University, whilst the main conference was held at the "Chateau on the Park" motel.

Twenty Years Ago We Landed on Titan

"Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man."
-- Luis Borges

Titan is the largest moon of Saturn, about 1.2 billion kilometres from Earth. Discovered in 1655 by Christiaan Huygens, the dense opaque atmosphere prevented any understanding of Titan's surface for many years. It is the only moon known to have an atmosphere with a greater density than Earth and the only known object in space that has stable bodies of surface liquid.

Another Year in Supercomputing (2024 edition)

The end of this year marks my seventeenth year working in high performance computing and my ninth at the University of Melbourne in this role. When I compare this to previous years there have been some notable changes in the technology and the system I am primarily involved with (Spartan), but also in my own employment activities. Late last year, there was a structural review of our operations at Research Computing Services, as the existing organisational chart was becoming unwieldy and increasingly untenable.

eResearch Australasia 2024

As per previous conferences, eResearch Australasia 2024 in Melbourne had several hundred attendees from the scientific research community, research computing developers and operators, administrators and managers, and various vendors. The program gives a very good indication of the level of this conference and the reason that it has been such a success over the last fifteen years and more.

ANTs tutorial with Slurm Workload Manager

This tutorial illustrates Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTs) to do image registration in 3D using data from Brain/MINDS data portal and how to apply the transforms/inverse transforms from image registration using the Slurm Workload Manager.

ANTs is described on their repository as follows:

"Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTs) is a C++ library available through the command line that computes high-dimensional mappings to capture the statistics of brain structure and function. It allows one to organize, visualize and statistically explore large biomedical image sets. Additionally, it integrates imaging modalities in space + time and works across species or organ systems with minimal customization."

The tutorial is derived from the tutorial at the Brain/MINDS data portal.

Intermediate Directory and File Manipulation

The basic Linux command for directory creation is mkdir $DIRNAME, with the most common options being -p to create parent directories and the handy verbose flag (-v) to print the directories to standard output as they are created. An array of subdirectories can also be created. e.g.,


$ mkdir -p -v examples/{dir1,dir2,dir3}
mkdir: created directory 'examples'
mkdir: created directory 'examples/dir1'
mkdir: created directory 'examples/dir2'
mkdir: created directory 'examples/dir3'

Pages