The University of Canterbury, where I work, announced not long ago that was buying the first Blue Gene supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere. I did not pay much attention until today while playing a squash game.
I play squash most Fridays, and this time we had a player from IT services. He was telling me about the installation of Blue Gene and we started talking about software.
— ‘So can I run Fortran 95?’ I asked.
— ‘Yes, of course’ he replied. ‘You can also use C, C++, Python with Numpy, etc.’ he added.
I heard Python and then I was much more interested. He already sent me the forms to get an account to run a few trials, connecting to the beast using SSH. Developing software has no cost, but running and using resources at a big scale will be charged. I have never used a supercomputer, but this sounds like a very interesting opportunity to try a few simulations that I have been thinking off. Really exciting stuff.
Keywords: Programming.