Jane Lo, Singapore Correspondent speaks with Andrew Howard, Cloud Team Manager, National Computational Infrastructure at the Australian National University (Canberra).

HPC and Cloud Computing have different security considerations and yet both involve humans being the weakest link, in particular within the HPC environment where there is often a higher level of trust required.

Andrew Howard has decades of hands-on technical, academic and logistics experience covering a wide range of standard and bespoke technologies, languages and applications within Industry, Government and Academia nationally and internationally.

His current role at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) covers working on High Performance Networks, Computing and Cloud systems. He led the development of InfiniCloud an extension of HPC InfiniBand capabilities into Openstack Clouds and the creation of the first trans-Pacific extended InfiniBand network connecting Australia and Singapore through the USA to deliver the next generation of high speed data transfer and distributed computation. Most recently he has worked closely with AARNet to define and implement AARNet-X a 100G network linking NCI to the world at the highest possible speed for big-data science.

Recorded at Super Computing Asia, held in Singapore, 11-14 March 2019