Meet Dr Stuart Midgley, CIO at DUG and self-confessed supercomputing evangelist.
Dr Stuart Midgley is DUG’s Chief Information Officer and self-confessed supercomputing evangelist. Stuart has a PhD in Theoretical Physics, and over 25 years expertise in high-performance computing (HPC) either as a user, application developer, tool developer, system administrator, system architect and general HPC addict. Stuart designed and developed the DUG Cool system of immersion-cooling technology, and was instrumental in the construction of DUG’s supercomputer facilities world-wide.
CORE has invited Stuart to present at our upcoming lunch and learn event, Tech Talk Tuesdays - an informal networking event centred around big ideas and big technology within an energy and mining context. Stuart will be taking us through High-Performance Computing as a Service (HPCaaS) and the drivers of big big-data solutions. His keynote will cover:
When Big Data scales up, you end up in the realm of high-performance computing (HPC).
A single server with a few GPUs is no longer enough—you need to run across multiple systems and have the ability to feed the hundreds of GPUs.
HPC provides the solutions to the space, power, cooling, speeds and feeds but is difficult to implement and support
HPCaaS enables organisations to scale their resources as their data and problem size grows
HPCaaS removes the technical barriers to implementing a scale-out solution
Ahead of this sure to be fantastic session, we caught up with Stuart to find out more about his role and what he is exciting about when it comes to really big data.
Take 5 with Dr Stuart Midgley
CORE: What does your role entail within the business and what will your key focus be in the coming months?
Stuart: As CIO I spend a lot of time talking to customers, understanding their issues and working with our technical teams to solve them. I keep a keen eye on new technology and investigate how we can bring this to our customers.
CORE: What are 2-3 industry challenges you are facing/coming across? These can be both micro and/or macro.
Stuart: Technology is changing really quickly and it can be difficult to keep track of the best way to solve your problems. Organisations struggle to attract the talent to implement complicated solutions, which are often outdated by the time they are rolled out. Most organisations want to focus on their core business, not get side-tracked by complicated data and processing issues.
CORE: What are your thoughts around the pace of technological change in the resources sector?
Stuart: Technology is evolving faster than most organisations can implement and support. For example, the amount of data that can be collected is greater than the processing capabilities of most organisations. They often don’t even have the network capacity to take the data off-site to an external provider.
Given the rapid commoditisation of HPC, which includes high-performance networking, most organisations need to engage HPC and big big-data processing specialists to shift the needle and allow their staff to get on with their core business function.
CORE: What does innovation mean to you and your company?
Stuart: Taking risks. Seeing the benefit of a technology and jumping in boots-and-all. Making it work, which often requires agile adjustment of technology and organisation processes.
CORE: What are you most excited about covering in your upcoming session?
Stuart: Showing people what is possible. HPC has been an amazing niche industry for a long time and it is now within reach of everyone through HPCaaS.
Hear more from Stuart at Tech Talk Tuesday
When: Tuesday 19 July
Time: 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: The Base, 191 St Georges Tce, Perth
Cost: FREE! Light lunch provided