Newsflash

World Record Challenge

Do you remember the time of the dial-up internet? If you do, I bet you have this "Eeeee-aww-eeee-aww-eeee-aww-eeee-aww" sound in your head. And you think these days are long gone, with fibre optic and 4G available almost everywhere. However, this is really not the case once you leave the shore and set to the ocean. After a few nautical miles, cellular data becomes incidental and gradually using satellite communication is inevitable. A mostly unknown but large population of men and women are working at sea for eight to ten months of the year, only seeing their families on rare occasions. Consider also fishermen and all those who defend our coasts against the multiple kinds of trafficking, including any type of goods, and even human trafficking, and who are fighting to protect the marine ecosystem. And all they have in terms of communications are two possibilities: satellite, or cellular systems such as the 3G used by your mobile phone. SeaFi offers a new third option. SeaFi facilitates the creation of private networks in ports and coastal areas by establishing connections between lighthouses, maritime wind turbines, or offshore drilling platforms and vessels at sea. These networks are used to connect the ships and their crews, as well as the data collection buoys (weather, tides) for example. 

In 2018, using the SeaFi technology invented by Arnaud Disant, a scientific world record for the longest wireless internet communication at sea was established: 19.4 nautical miles (35.92 km). This year we are challenging this record. You might ask - why do you want to challenge your own record? Well, competing with yourself is the ultimate form of self-improvement and the one challenge that never ends. When we compete with ourselves, we focus on our own progress and growth, and we set our own standards of excellence. While striving to be better than we were yesterday, we push ourselves to new heights and achieve things we never thought possible. We have already been asked how to contribute to our effort. A fundraiser has been set up. Your contribution will go directly towards chartering the local cargo supply vessel that is essential to venture offshore beyond 19.4 nautical miles, thus making a positive impact on our community. If you would like to contribute, please follow this link

 


#SeaFi Challenge

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The 2020 SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing & Scientific Computing

The 2020 SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing & Scientific Computing

Home to the world’s largest internet company as well as other renowned tech giants, Seattle seems like the perfect place for a meeting on high performance computing. This year’s SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing & Scientific Computing - SIAM PP20 for short - took place right in the centre of the rainy city.

Hundreds of scientists from all over the world met to discuss emerging issues in scientific computing. From best practices in benchmarking to reducing communications between processors and code reproducibility, some of which have been topics of interest for many years as anyone learning about David Bailey’s “12 Ways to fool the masses” (1991) in an introductory course on computing can probably attest to.

Of particular interest to numerical modellers, like myself, were the more application-oriented minisymposia on for example HPC Simulations of the Hydrological Cycle which showed various operational hydrological models and discussed downscalings of numerical weather prediction data as well as the need for scientific advances in the handling of physical processes, and forcing data in the computer codes as well as the need for numerical analysis research on for example preconditioning and operator splitting to tackle mathematically more difficult problems in a more efficient manner.

I contributed to the session on High-Performance Numerics and Model Development for Geophysical Systems organised by Dr Thomas Gibson (Naval Postgraduate School), Dr David Ham (Imperial College London), and Dr Chris Eldred (Sandia National Laboratories). In this minisymposium the other speakers and I presented and discussed scaling results of non-hydrostatic models for the ocean, current advances in preconditioning for split implicit methods, entropy conserving discretisations as well as adaptive mesh refinement for novel discretisation techniques.

 One of my personal highlights was the minisymposium on HPC Aspects of Tsunami Simulations. It comprised an impressive summary of the Exahype project (https://exahype.eu/) and their coupling of earthquake and tsunami simulations in a computationally efficient framework as well as current accelerator-based advances of the software geoclaw that is used for tsunami predictions in the Seattle area and developed at the University of Washington.

Written by : Nicole Beisiegel