Jonathan Dursi

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When Research Infrastructure Is and Isn't Maintained

(Note: This post is adapted from #53 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) There were two big stories in the news this week (as I write this, at the end of 2020) about what’s possible with sustained research infrastructure funding and what happens when research infrastructure isn’t sustained. In the first, you’ve probably read about AlphaFold, Google Brain’s efforts to bring deep learning to protein folding. It did very well in the 14th annual Critical Assessment of (protein) Structure Prediction (CASP) contest. Predictably but unfortunately,...

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Buckle up, CPUs are going to get weirder

The M1 is a good test run, let’s get ready (Note: This post is adapted from last week’s issue 51 of the resarch computing teams newsletter) The big news of the past month has been Apple’s new M1 CPU. The M1’s specs in and of themselves kind of interesting, but more important to us in research computing is that the M1 is an example of how CPUs are going to get more different as time goes on, and that will have impacts on our teams....

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What will Post-Pandemic Academic Research Computing Look Like?

We’re nowhere near the endgame yet. But even now in the middle of the COVID-19 times it is not too soon to think about what research computing will look like when the threat of infection by SARS-CoV-2 no longer shapes our work lives. While the future looks good for research computing team individual contributors who are willing to learn on the fly, the coming years will be treacherous for teams as organizations, and their managers. What hath 2020 wrought There’s a few pretty unambiguous “inputs”...

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Things I Learned from Looking at 500 Research Computing Manager Jobs over 10 Months

I write a weekly newsletter for research computing managers, team leads, or those aspiring to those roles. One of the things I’ve wanted to emphasize in the newsletter is that managing research computing teams is a profession in and of itself, and worth doing well. Part of that is emphasizing the existence of career opportunities. So since the beginning I’ve included job listings and maintained a job board, posting about 500 such jobs over the past 10 months and removing them as they become filled...

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White Managers in Research Computing, We Need to be Speaking Out About Racism, then Listening and Advocating

Many people in our research computing community — and in the broader research community we serve — are in pain this week. There’s another video of another Black man, George Floyd, begging for his life while being murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. Here in Toronto a Black woman, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, died when what should have been a routine call resulted in a mystifying number of police officers showing up. With only police officers present in her apartment, she went over her high-rise balcony...

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COBOL, Imperial College, Bursty Maintenance, and Sustained Scientific Software

We’ve all read about the huge rise in unemployment claims causing unprecedented loads on US state software systems, with the situation so dire that the governor of New Jersey put out an urgent call for COBOL programmers. It’s worth looking at this from the point of view of research software, where we need software to be sustainable and reproducible for long periods of time. The systems that need suddenly need COBOL developers have often been chugging away with maintenance and tweaks for 40–50 years. This...

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