About Lev Lafayette

Crocodile Logo

Lev Lafayette has an MCCSP (Master of Climate Change Science and Policy) from the University of Wellington, a MHEd from Otago University, an MSc (Information Systems) from Salford University, and an MBA (Technology Management) from the Chifley Business School, where he was on the Dean's List. He also has a Graduate Certificate in Project Management from the same institution and an honours degree from Murdoch University in Politics, Philosophy and Sociology which is commented upon by the Vice-Chancellor of the time. Many years later, he completed a Graduate Certificate in Adult and Tertiary Education at the same institution. He also has a Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology from the University of Auckland. He is now doing a PhD at the United Nations Treaty Organisation, Euclid University in climatology and economics.

He is a certified PRINCE2 Practioner, and an Adult and Workplace Trainer. With an interdisciplinary approach, Lev's interests include the political implementation of universal pragmatics, the relationship between communications technology and society, and comparative economic systems.

Professionally, however, Lev is an experienced systems administrator, specialising in the Linux operating system and scientific applications, a project manager, systems engineer, and quality management systems coordinator, specifically for ISO 9001 (Quality assurance) and ISO 270001 (Information Technology Security). He also does a lot of training for researchers and technical staff in Linux, High Performance Computing, mathematical programming, databases, and related subjects, with graduates and post-doctoral researchers from a variety of organisations, including (deep breath):

RMIT, La Trobe University, the University of Melbourne, Deakin University, Swinburne University, Victoria University of Technology, Monash University, the Australian Synchrotron, the Department of Environment and Primary Industries (Victoria), the University of Sydney, Macquarie University, the University of New South Wales, the University of Western Australia, the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, the Westmead Millennium Institute, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, the Australian Institution of Marine Science, the Orygen Institute, The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.

Previous employment and clients include several years working as a computer systems trainer and database management for the Parliamentary Labor Party in Victoria. Following this, he worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Timor Leste (East Timor) managing their computer network and providing training and technical expertise to that Ministry in their first year of self-governance. Dr. Ramos-Horta provided the following comments on his work.

Lev works for the Research Computing Services group at the University of Melbourne as the Senior High Performance Computing Development and Operations Engineer, and prior to that Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, as a systems administrator for Linux clusters and as the Quality Management Coordinator. As per those roles, this site is mostly dedicated to issues concerning High Performance Computing, Scientific Computing and Supercomputing. Lev is involved in Linux Users of Victoria, having spent four years as President, two years as Public Officer, two years as Vice-President, a year as Treasurer and is now in his third year as an ordinary committee member. He has had a coordinating role atMulticore World and was MC for the first several conferences.

The crocodile logo was designed by Victoria Jankowski. It was first used on the cover of Neon-komputadór, the first IT training manual for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in East Timor that was printed and translated by the United Nations Development Programme. The crocodile represents the Timorese people and is the emblem of their land. The integrated circuit represents their independent connectivity to the wider world.

You can also find a political site that Lev subscribes to, The Isocracy Network, a synthesis of several progressive political orientations, and RPG Review which covers his interests in roleplaying and simulation games, including as editor of the namesake journal. This includes being the author of one very ironic RPG (Papers & Paychecks) and supplement (Cow-Orkers in the Scary Devil Monastery), a co-author of another (Fox Magic, author a supplement, Rolemaster Companion VI), as well as plot and character development in the computer game Cargo. He has also been a playtester for RuneQuest, Traveller, Basic Role Playing, and Eclipse Phase.

As a naturalistic pantheist with an interfaith perspective, he manages and contributes to the Lightbringers website that includes various addresses and essays on philosophy and religion. Recently, he has taken up the role of University Outreach Officer for the International Society for Philosophers.

Finally, he also has a livejournalDreamwidth account, which will probably be quite boring to anyone who doesn't know him personally.

That's enough of me talking about myself in the third person like Cerebus The Aardvark.

Quantum Computing and Quantum Computers

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Mon, 04/14/2025 - 13:13


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

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Mon, 03/17/2025 - 11:51

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.

Lament: A Facebook Messenger JSON to HTML converter

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Tue, 02/25/2025 - 03:23

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

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Thu, 02/13/2025 - 10:04

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

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Tue, 01/14/2025 - 09:49

"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)

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Fri, 12/27/2024 - 02:59

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

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Thu, 11/07/2024 - 12:31

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

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Wed, 10/23/2024 - 05:47

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

Submitted by lev_lafayette on Wed, 08/07/2024 - 06:59

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