Yesterday, my wife and I together with my two kids (13 and 11 yo) visited Infotech. I was not expecting much but, to be honest, this edition of Infotech is more interesting than I expected. Some of the noteworthy gadgets or technologies to discover are:

• Robots: Logan Velvindron (of LUGM) and Chris Gunnoo (Computer Studies teacher at Saint-Esprit College) were demonstrating various kinds of robots (The Finch controlled with Scratch, one built using an Arduino board and capable of drawing, etc.) Chris is really passionate about explaining computer science to kids and I’m happy that my son will (most probably) have him as teacher next year.
• 3D Printers: 2016 is finally going to be the year of 3D printing in Mauritius. We talked to people from two companies who were demonstrating 3D printers. They explained how to create 3D models by using software such as SketchUp (which is free) or Blender (open source software). Once the 3D model is created, it can be sent to any 3D printer by using software such as MatterControl, ReplicatorG or OctoPrint (all of them open source software, hence free).
• Large touch screens: Imagine kids in kindergartens using a tablet as a table. Or a tablet two meters wide and affixed on a wall. Or even a transparent window with superimposed images and which responds to touch. This is what we saw yesterday and, while the kids were happy to play Fruit Ninja on a 40″ screen, my wife and I were more interested in the potential of this kind of technology for learning as well as for teaching (using the Open Sankoré software for example).
• Segways (or, more precisely, good imitations…): Both my daughter and my son enjoyed riding a segway for the first time in their lives. They had no difficulty in learning the basics and, after just one minute, were happily driving (for lack of a better word) in the exhibition hall. I promise: next time I’ll try.
• Virtual Reality by EON Experience: The idea is for a group of people to wear 3D glasses and watch a 3D movie projected on all walls as well as on the floor. This is quite a nice effect in itself. Now, one of the participants, who wears a special type of 3D glass (worn by my son in one of the photos above), controls the point of view of the camera with which the movie is being shown. By moving his head, my son could change the direction of the camera and the movie was being modified in real-time. Very very cool. One of the demos showed Saturn and, for example, by sitting down, one could see under the ring while, standing up, one sees above the ring. Of course, the system requires specially made movies and this is what EON Reality, the company behind EON Experience, does. The demo was done on the Mauritius Telecom stand.
• Miscellaneous gadgets: drones (both for amateurs and for professionals), handheld camera stabilizers + smartphones, tablets and computers (of course…)

There was also a part where recruitment was being done most notably by Amazon for its Web Services team. I had a very nice conversation with Chris Perkins, from their Cape Town office, and he is actively looking for Linux experts.

All in all, we spent two hours at Infotech 2015 and, for the first time since ages, we felt we didn’t waste our time.

In December 2014, LinkedIn analyzed the skills and experience data in over 330 million LinkedIn member profiles to answer the question “Who’s getting hired and what are they doing?”. The above image shows the 25 Hottest Skills of 2014. Maybe a better way of looking at things would be to put these jobs in different categories to try to answer “Who’s getting hired and what field they are getting in?”:

Information Technology – Data Science

• Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
• Business Intelligence
• Data Engineering and Data Warehousing
• SAP ERP Systems

Information Technology – Infrastructure

• Middleware and Integration Software
• Storage Systems and Management
• Network and Information Security
• Mac, Linux and Unix Systems
• Virtualization
• Shell Scripting Languages

Information Technology – Software Development

• Mobile Development
• Web Architecture and Development Framework
• Algorithm Design
• Perl/Python/Ruby
• Java Development

Information Technology – User Experience

• User Interface Design
• Computer Graphics and Animation
• Game Development

Digital Marketing

• SEO/SEM Marketing
• Marketing Campaign Management
• Digital and Online Marketing
• Channel Marketing

Other

• Recruiting
• Economics
• Integrated Circuit (IC) Design

It is clear that Information Technology rules supreme. 72% of the jobs are IT jobs in data science, infrastructure, software development and user experience. We can even argue that all the digital marketing jobs as well as IC design are in IT increasing the proportion to 92%.

This also means that schools and universities will have to adapt to provide classes in these high-demand fields for the sake of the young people currently studying but also for the enterprises in Mauritius as well as the country as a whole.

Let’s hope they do. Signs are not very encouraging though with, for example, the University of Mauritius being still stuck in the 20th century. What do you think?

(Tianhe-2, the most powerful supercomputer. China.)

For the past few months, the Mauritius Research Council has been working on the setting up of a National Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Mauritius. As a member of the committee, I have been thinking a lot about the importance of having supercomputing facilities in Mauritius.

Why do we need supercomputers?

• Supercomputers are immensely powerful computers which can be used to perform simulations of various processes. For example, supercomputers are used to simulate airflow on an aircraft wing, particle movement during a nuclear blast, the interaction between molecules during a chemical reaction or the movement of bodies in space. Without supercomputers, the cost of getting these insights would be prohibitively high. Supercomputers allow us to understand very complex processes without having to actually do them thanks to simulation.
• Supercomputers, being so powerful,  are also used to perform brute force calculations. One good example is trying to predict weather. The meteorological station has a myriad of sensors everywhere measuring temperature, wind speed, humidity, etc. and, from these millions of data points, calculations need to be done in order to know what will happen next. The difficulty, of course, is to come up with a solution quickly enough for this information to be useful to us.
• Supercomputers allow us to learn and leverage molecular dynamics. As explained on Wikipedia, “Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation of physical movements of atoms and molecules in the context of N-body simulation. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a period of time, giving a view of the motion of the atoms. In the most common version, the trajectories of atoms and molecules are determined by numerically solving the Newton’s equations of motion for a system of interacting particles, where forces between the particles and potential energy are defined by interatomic potentials or molecular mechanics force fields.” The interesting part is that, once someone knows about molecular dynamics, he/she can apply the principle in different fields.

What will we have to learn?

• A supercomputer is, in essence, a computer with thousands if not millions of processors instead of the few we have in our normal computers. In order to use the capabilities of a supercomputer to the full, it is important that software applications be written to work concurrently. This means that, when run on a parallel computer such as a supercomputer, the software can distribute work over the myriad of processors instead of running on one processor only. From a technical perspective, this is difficult to achieve. For instance, when using C or C++, this can be done by leveraging the Open MPI library. When developing in Java, one can use the Concurrency Utilities. Software developers will have to learn how to use these powerful features and this is harder than it looks because it requires a change in mindset: thinking parallel instead of sequential is hard. Interestingly, when I was a lecturer at the University of Mauritius, I taught Concurrency and Parallelism to final year students so I may have a few things to contribute at this level.
• A supercomputer is, in essence, a massive cluster running Linux. As everyone knows by now, Linux has eaten the world. And this is especially true for supercomputers where Linux powers 97% of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. For example, the most powerful supercomputer in the world, Tianhe-2, runs Kylin Linux. The next one, Titan, runs Cray Linux. The third one, Sequoia BlueGene/Q, also runs Linux. And so on and so forth. This means that the setting up of a supercomputer in Mauritius will require the expertise of a number of Linux system administrators who are comfortable with clustering and parallelism. Interestingly, at Knowledge Seven, we provide the best Linux courses in Mauritius.
• Finally, our researchers will have to think out of the box. Simple problems with their simple solutions do not require the use of supercomputers. In order to fully utilise the immense power of supercomputers, we will have to start thinking about solving the big problems. This will require researchers to move out of their respective silos and work together. Naturally, this is because big problems are generally multi-disciplinary. This change in mindset will take some time as we, in Mauritius, love our respective silos and their associated benefits…

Is there a risk?

Yes, as frequently in Mauritius, we tend to focus on the hardware and software and forget that the most important component is peopleware. If our decision makers, our researchers, our developers and our sysadmins do not know how to leverage a supercomputer, then it is useless to have one in the country, gathering dust and quickly becoming obsolete while costing millions.

To prevent this kind of situation, the Mauritius Research Council is organising an Awareness Workshop on High Performance Computing (HPC) in Mauritius from 26 to 28 August 2015 where those who might benefit from supercomputing will be able to talk with those who offer supercomputing solutions. I understand that invitations to participate in the workshop will be sent shortly. On Thursday 27 August from 11:15 – 12:15, I will moderate a session for various organisations who will be able to come and explain what problems they are trying to solve and how they intend to leverage supercomputing facilities in the future.