This is a cover page for the Distributed and High Performance Computing (DHPC) research group at the Institute of Information and Mathematical Science (IIMS) at Massey university in New Zealand. The main DHPC web site is at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.
DHPC started in Adelaide University in 1996 and was led there until 2000 by Ken Hawick. In 2000 Ken left to head up the new Computer Science Division at the University of Wales, Bangor in the UK. Paul Coddington took over the Adelaide part of DHPC and the group continued as an international collaboration between Ken and Heath James in Wales, and Paul in Australia. In 2003 Ken and Heath left Wales to join Massey University in New Zealand. In 2007 Heath left Academia to work for the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO). Paul continues to direct DHPC at Adelaide.
Research on parallel computing continues at Massey through the Centre for Parallel Computing and also the high performance simulations work of the Complex Systems and Simulations research group. This latter, includes work on accelerator processing devices such as GPGPUs. A preprint of a recent paper, to appear in the Journal: Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience appears as Massey Technical Note CSTN-065.
The DHPC group at Adelaide was started to investigate metacomputing or computational grid systems, and cluster computing, but later diversified into distributed middleware. Some of DHPC's most noted projects are:
Another important area of DHPC work was in cluster computing. Ken rescued 8 486 PCs from a junk shop to build our first Beowulf cluster system in 1996 and the data and student activity we generated from that launched collaborations with Physics, Chemistry and Geography departments. Our interests in cluster systems continued at Bangor and here at Massey in New Zealand.
Computer Science is notorious for recycling ideas after long cycles - the current (2009) interest in cloud computing was foreshadowed by many of the metacomputing ideas of the late 1990s. The DHPC DISCWorld project was essentially a cloud computing management software management infrastructure. An idea before its time described in DHPC Technical note DHPC-042 - a preprint of an article in the Journal: Future Generation Computer Systems in 1998.
The definitive DHPC web pages are in Adelaide at: www.dhpc.adelaide.edu.au and in particular the DHPC Technical reports are stored there. As a rough historical Guide Tech Notes 1-70 were written when Ken and Heath were at Adelaide, 71-128 during the Bangor period. See also our new series of technical notes in computational science.