Title: Department of Computer Science Seminar
Date:  Wednesday, 18 June 2003
Time:  4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]


Title:   Open Source and Parallel Computing in the public sector

Speaker: Dr. Ole Nielsen (Urban Risk Research Group, Geoscience Australia)


Abstract:
  Even though academic institutions have embraced open source
  software development for decades, it is only very recently that
  corporations and government organisations have started to seriously
  consider it.

  With IT minister Richard Alstons recent remarks and the government
  e-strategy of November 2002 it seems that open source is about to gain
  acceptance within the Australian public sector.

  In this talk I will firstly report on my initial experiences
  promoting open source within Geoscience Australia in the form of
  a Linux environment and a demonstration of a small Beowulf cluster.

  Secondly, I'll describe an open source project of my own, namely an
  interface to a subset of the message passing interface (MPI),
  which allows programs written in Python to make use of parallel
  platforms such as Beowulfs.


Audience:
  Individuals with interest in the role of open source and
  with appreciation of parallel computing.


Biography:
  Ole Nielsen got his PhD in scientific computing at the Technical
  University of Denmark in 1998. After a short stint as a consultant
  at a supercomputing facility he joined the ANU Data Mining group
  where he researched multilevel techniques for predictive modelling,
  large scale data mining and bio-informatics.
  Ole Nielsen recently took up a position as modeller-come-software-
  engineer with the Urban Risk Research Group at Geoscience Australia
  where he is developing tools to assist the group and, in the process
  of that, pushing for increased awareness of open source.


URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars03/dept20030618