Last week in review

It was only a two day week last week, so limited progress.

Sys admin

Usually I deal with one request every week or so for assistance on our compute servers, but last week I helped six different individuals - it seems deadline season is upon us, and so all of our mega-computers have been busy. Social scheduling of time on the machines I tend to push back on, but I have been trying to slot people in where I can see an opportunity to unblock them. But we also had some technical issues with tools: I helped one person with running GRASS GIS against our NAS (by default it gets upset about the unusual permissions on the NAS), I did some R testing for another person, and I looked at what was troubling something else without resolution, just I had to slow him down as his workload kept running out of memory.

Tropical Moist Forest Methodology

I had a review of what Patrick had been up to whilst I was away, and made a PR against some code he then removed :) I got access to some of the missing source data thanks to Miranda and Tom, and I’ve started trying to work on convincing myself I have the inputs we need to run the counterfactuals. This included using Google Earth Engine for the first time so I could extract bits of data.

Arkish things

I showed Alison how to use my containerised environments for Littlejohn and Python3, having installed it on all the nodes in our little cluster. This shook out a couple of issues that I tidied up and fixed, so hopefully Alison can use them in anger now.

This coming week

• More on the TMFM work
• Seeing if I can help Tom B compute faster