By Bigani Sehurutshi (University of Botswana)

When I got news that my SC18 support was approved, I was delighted, but at the same time in the dark about the whole thing as it was my first time to attend a conference of such magnitude.

After registration, I faced the dilemma about which sessions to attend. As I was the only delegate from University of Botswana (UB) to attend this year, I tried by all means to gather as much information as I could for UB researchers, systems administrators and everyone else. As a sysadmin, I was attracted to container computing sessions and attended a number of them, as well as tutorials on Krbenetes and an HPC containers BoF.

For the benefit of our UB  cluster, I went to sessions on MPI & OpenMPI; many tools and packages are based on the two. Due to time constraints, code snippets of MPI were shown to illustrate some of the concepts. They also shared where you can get access to training materials on the Internet for a more in-depth introduction and advanced MPI tutorials. I also attended a Spack workshop to learn about alternative ways to deploy packages on our HPC systems.

I had the opportunity to attend a BoF on HPC education, outreach and training. We have been struggling with starting HPC outreach and training in Botswana. From that BoF, I’m confident that we have an outreach road map for the Botswana community. The growth of HPC will benefit the country and projects like the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) in which Botswana is a partner country. I also took part in discussions for scaling HPC outreach and education.

The exhibition gave me an opportunity to network and make inquiries on different technologies offered by diverse vendors.

I would like to extend my sincere appreciation and thanks to those who supported me, and made SC18 a success. Thanks a million to UB, STEM-Trek and their alliance with Micron Foundation, Cray, HPCNow! and the SC18 General and Inclusivity Chairs. You have done a tremendous amount of work in making Botswana big for the first time. A precious thank you to Elizabeth Leake  (STEM-Trek) for her enormous support. We say PULA in Botswana to show our tremendous appreciation.

Watch UbuntuHouse@SC18 sponsors’ and friends’ websites to see what they did at SC18!