Open Parallel’s Expression of Interest begins with the project Middleware for SKA

 

Relevant experience

Open Parallel and its partners have relevant experience in distributed work at large scale projects, being the open source software development model the most significant.

Open Parallel participates in SKA activities, being active member of the New Zealand SKA Industry Consortium (NZSKAIC) since early 2011.

Other activities involved several presentations particularly at the Rutherford Innovation Showcase in Wellington (September 2011) and Multicore World 2012 (see Miscellaneous)

 

In 2012, Open Parallel -sponsored by NZTE, worked at CSIRO (Sydney, directly with Tim Cornwell and Ben Humphreys) in the development of the proposal which is part of this EoI.

 

Open Parallel also is a stakeholder in the NZ SKA Open Consortium which has an EoI for both the CSP and the SDP Work Packages as well as the Telescope manager.

 

This participation gives Open Parallel direct links with Auckland University of Technology radio astronomy group, for example included Mahmoud S. Mahmoud (AUT) giving a talk at the Multicore World 2012 event.

 

The NZ SKA Open Consortium is an open collaborative group of approximately 30 academics across 7 departments in 4 Universities and industry partners with various levels of engagement. It aims to ensure that NZ has a strong stake in the SKA, particularly in the computing aspects. We support any industry initiative to grow the capabilities of our NZ computing environment and are strong supporters of student placements and co-supervision on industry projects. The Consortium believes that the expertise provided by Open Parallel would be very beneficial to the SKA project.

 

Open Parallel is a young organisation (founded in 2010) but its predecessor (World45 Ltd) was strongly involved in the establishment of an ecosystem in New Zealand around Multicore Processing and parallel programming.

 

World45 was ISV and partner with Sun Microsystems between 2005 – 2008 and the company -which was based at the Centre for Innovation in Dunedin, was instrumental on the University of Otago becoming the first Sun Microsystems – Oracle OpenSPARC Centre of Excellence of the world outside the United States. That achievement was thanks to World45’s strong relation with Sun Microsystems at executive level, and the long term vision was that New Zealand would be the hub from where APAC clients would be serviced in their HPC, performance and scalability needs.

 

World45 had a formal signed agreement (MoU and contracts) with the University of Otago, with our servers being in the test bed of the university and having other levels of collaboration i.e. bringing researchers to Silicon Valley in industry developments or having undergraduate, graduate and PhD students working at different stages at World45. We intend to do similar actions with our projects involving SKA, this time with all universities and education institutes.

 

The GFC and the change of ownership of Sun (bought by Oracle) interrupted that project activities and the business ceased operations, but it was a large scale international project involving several major corporations (Sun clients in APAC) and countries.

 

Open Parallel follows that path. Know how generated from those years was transferred to New Zealand Government in a report called “Multicore NZ“, commissioned by NZTE to Erdody Consultancy Ltd.

Open Parallel was established following the recommendations of that report