ANITA Townhall Meeting at 2011 ASA ASM
We held an ANITA townhall meeting at this year’s ASA ASM. Here are the minutes of the meeting:
1) Darren presented an overview of …
- ANITA; it’s intent and purpose
- our newletters for the past year
- our demographics. Currently 87 members; 74% male and 43% students
- our website
2) Daniel presented a discussion of this past year’s meetings and the upcoming ANITA meeting at Monash
- ANITA 2011 Workshop: 38 participants & 18 talks
- ANITA 2012 Workshop: 13-14 Feb @ Monash
- Daniel also announced a computational meeting associated with the ANITA 2012 meeting
- Symposium on Nuclei in the Cosmos
3) Jarrod presented an update on gSTAR
- available ~ Sept 2011
- supplied by SGI
- 50 GPU nodes
- QDR Infiniband
- 40+ GPUs in 2nd phase (late 2011)
- 75% for national astronomy access
- any astronomer at a publicly funded institution
- 50% is merit allocation
- remainder for general access
- 1M CPU-hours available on Swinburne system
- Jarrod also reminded us about the Melbourne HPC GPU workshop @ Monash; July 13-14
4) Luke Hodkinson gave an overview of NCI Support for supercomputing
- NCI merit allocation schemes
- NCI support for GPUing software etc
- Those interested can submit project requests HERE
5) Darren lead a discussion of the Midterm Review recommendation: “Over the period of 2012-2015, under the coordination of ANITA, a strategic plan for theoretical astrophysics should be developed.”
- Comments from the floor: what is our resource use and research focus now? Only with that knowledge can we say where we are going.
- ACTION: ensure that computing facilities are acknowledged in publications so that we can collect statistics. In particular: do we have to identify areas to concentrate on?
- Darren presented ideas from steering committee meeting:
- Create a strategic plan
- Submit to the Academy of Science
- Consultation of both theorists and observers
- Prepared by ANITA steering committee
- Input from a (small?) advisory committee
- This should be a plan for the next 3 years as well as to position theory for the 2015-2025 Decandal Plan
- Submission date 1st March 2012
- ACTION: The steering committee will initiate the strategic plan process and begin consultation with the theory community in the next 1-2 months.
The slides from the meeting can be found here: (Download)