Does Denmark need a science cloud?

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cloud1

4 years ago we, the ScienceCloud group at DeIC, launched the scientific data-management service data.deic.dk.

It was a first attempt at building something like this out of open-source components: FreeBSD, ZFS, Apache, ownCloud/Nextcloud and involved engaging with similar projects in other countries (Switzerland, Australia, Germany, Holland) and open-source environments (Nextcloud, CS3).

Today this service hosts about 100 TB of … Read the rest

Sciencedata open for testing

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sciencedata_front

This is the intended replacement for our old workhorse, data.deic.dk. Those who would like to try out new features targeted at researchers, please give it a try. You’ll need to be able to log in via wayf/edugain, i.e. you need to be affiliated with a European research institution.

The new features we’re exploring are:

- ORCID integration
- Zenodo… Read the rest

What’s worse than ODBC?

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TheHomer

The classic “Process (aka Designing the Stop Sign)” nails the problem of (Over-) Design By Committee.

But is the real problem here using a committee? Can design not be meaningfully accomplished by group of people working together?

I claim the answer is yes and that typical problem is not the committee per se, but the clueless committee – regardless … Read the rest

Booting Ubuntu-14.04 cloud images without a cloud

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Ubuntu-trusty

So, Ubuntu-14.04, Trusty Tahr, is out; and booting the cloud images requires a bit more hacking than booting the 12.04 cloud images. Here goes:

Get the image, resize and loop-back mount it:

wget cloud-images.ubuntu.com/trusty/current/trusty-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img
qemu-img convert -c -O qcow2 trusty-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img trusty-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1_30GB.qcow2
qemu-img resize trusty-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1_30GB.qcow2 30G
sudo modprobe nbd
sudo qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 `pwd`/trusty-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1_30GB.qcow2
ls image || mkdir image
sudo … Read the rest

Does Denmark need a supercomputer?

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The more precise question is:

Do researchers at Danish universities need a supercomputer on the top-500 list?

A bit of background is useful:

The funding model for HPC in Danish academia, employed since ~2000, described in a previous post, has resulted in a decentralized HPC infrastructure which AFAIK is quite unique in Europe (other European countries have a

… Read the rest

Booting Ubuntu-12.04 cloud images without a cloud

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images

I was recently asking myself why the P2V concept has not been more fully embraced by the open-source community – and generalized to V2C, virtual machine to cloud instance. From a scientific computing perspective, it would be ideal to seamlessly be able to prototype a data analysis in a virtual machine on a laptop and then run large-scale data … Read the rest

Backup Google Drive / Docs

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google-drive
Cloud storage is often used for backup, but finding myself relying more and more on cloud-only documents, I felt a need for backup in the opposite direction: backing up my entire Google Drive to local storage – preserving the folder hierarchy. I was not able to find a script that does this, so I wrote one myself. I chose … Read the rest

Awesome Note + Google Drive

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354491-awesomenote

For a long time I’ve been looking for a note-taking app that:

1) is available as an iPhone/iPad app ✔

2) synchronizes to either my own server or Google Docs/Drive ✔

3) has a web interface

4) supports organization of notes in hierarchical folders

5) has “todo” functionality (creation and due dates) ✔

6) allows assignment of priorities ✔

This … Read the rest

Squeezebox and the new LastFM API

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squeezebox_mr

Since my last post about SqueezeScrobbler on my Squeezebox, I’ve enjoyed 3 years of LastFM listening on Squeezeboxes, Linux and Mac boxes, iPhones and iPads.

Well, this fall, LastFM announced that they would hit my listening pleasure with dual strikes: deprecation of the old API and discontinuation of the radio service in other countries than the US, UK and Germany. … Read the rest