That is a good point but I think it doesn't apply everywhere.that has a similar shape. New Zealand has a similar shape but without railways interconnecting cities. You cannot cross the country, the islands, or even regions by train.
I think this could be a variable to contribute to a good coverage and infrastructure... but there are probably more factors involved.
The population density is probably one factor. New Zealand has 5.34 million people in 103,000 square miles. At the other extreme you have Hong Kong with 7.5 million people in 430 square miles. Each mile of track gives service to a much larger percentage of the population in Hong Kong than New Zealand. The same goes for a lot of the United States. The coastal corridors in the United States are population dense, but the interior less so.
Population density is one thing. Another issue is timing.
New Zealand was a really young country when railway technology came along, and didn't really have enough time or money to invest in a good railway network before other technology came along.
Airplanes are the perfect technology for NZ's geography, because they just fly over everything. There are actually a few places in NZ that received passenger airline service in the 30s before they received a railway connection (namely Gisborne), and many other places that never received railway connections.
At the same time, NZ was one of the fastest adopters of the automobiles, second only to America.
I think viable cars and airplanes had taken another 25 years to arrive, NZ might have had a much more complete railway network, with a much better chance of surviving intact into the modern era.
Didn't know about these historical facts, looks like timing really contributed to the current situation in New Zealand. When I was in Auckland some years ago, I remember NZ trying to bring some railway services back, before the pandemic.
I never got to travel on these, but I'm hoping to do that when I'm there again, probably next year. I see the website is still the same, so if anyone is going to NZ: https://www.greatjourneysnz.com/.
And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill.
The railway services NZ are trying to bring back are regional commuter services. Auckland to Hamilton (now in operation); Auckland to Tauranga; Wellington to Palmerston North (Capital Connection, has been in operation for 35 years, about to be upgraded to battery-electric trains, since only half the route is electrified).
And also the vague idea of local rail service around Christchurch (interestingly, a private company bought the old DMUs from Auckland's local fleet after electrification and are just starting to run special trains for Rugby games).
Part of the problem is that there is only really only three metro areas in New Zealand. Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Everything else isn't really large enough to provide enough demand for a proper intercity route. And Christchurch isn't even on the same island, so you can't have a proper intercity train with the ferry getting in the way.
So the only potentially viable intercity route is Auckland to Wellington.
And apart from Hamilton and Palmerston North, (which already have commuter trains) there is absolutely nothing in the middle. The same distance in Europe or the US's eastern corridor would service 4-6 decently sized metro areas, and provide plenty of extra demand.
There just isn't enough potential demand to put a high-speed rail line through there. And without the high-speed rail, it's a 10 hour train trip that has zero chance of competing with a 1 hour plane ride.
Christchurch to Wellington is even worse. 6 hour train ride, at least an hour waiting for the ferry, 3.5 hour ferry ride. The plane does it in at little as 25 min in the air, there isn't enough time to reach cruising altitude. There is a reason why the route used to be serviced by an overnight ferry.
> And to be fair, looks like you can more or less cross the country, as long as you don't plan to get all the way to Invercargill
Yeah... but those aren't "intercity trains". They are scenic tourist trains that just so happen to be running along old intercity routes. Not bad as a tourism experience, but overpriced and not optimised for transportation needs.
The fact that you can't book both the Interislander ferry and costal pacific on the same website is very telling. They are literally run by the same company.
Same company that's providing the Rugby special trains, but this is using the old Capital Connection rolling stock. The train usually runs day trips up to Arthur's pass for cruise ships, but when there is a gap in that schedule they are running these Christchurch to Dunedin and Christchurch to Invercargill excursions.
I remember the announcement some years ago of the Auckland-Hamilton train. I think initially it had limited schedule, but from what I recall the usage was quite good after the launch (I think it was before or just after the pandemic). Good to know it's in operation now.
> And also the vague idea of local rail service around Christchurch (interestingly, a private company bought the old DMUs from Auckland's local fleet after electrification and are just starting to run special trains for Rugby games).
Hadn't heard about this! Interesting, and good idea to have a service for the games.
> So the only potentially viable intercity route is Auckland to Wellington.
This one would probably be quite busy. I had to fly Auckland-Wellington quite a bit as an engineer, and our managers & executives travel quite more (NIWA, a CRI that now I believe has merged with another one and changed its name).
Eventually I had to go to the capital to vote or for the embassy, or for a tech event. All these trips were always via airplane, but I'd be happy to get a fast train or a night train as in Europe.
Learned another new thing, thank you! I plan to go to Invercargill when I visit again to see if I can see the Aurora Australis or maybe check out where they have the MetService radiosonde launch. From what I recall MetService used to launch one from Invercargill near the airport (or I could be confused with a weather station or another climate monitoring station they had there).
What about options for those living up north? When I was still in Auckland some of my co-workers were looking into moving further West/North (there were too many people moving to South Auckland/Raglan/Hamilton at that time). But I remember the transport options involved one or more buses, and a ferry in the case of a co-worker that bought a house in... Hobsonville I believe. But the ferry didn't run all days, and had a limited schedule compared to the one for Waiheke or Devenport. Has that improved?
I always thought it'd be nice if there was a short train line connecting Devenport to Cape Reinga, as all the times I went to Cape Reinga or to take someone to Russel I'd have to drive or find a private shuttle.
I agree that if you put a high-speed line between Auckland and Wellington, and get the travel time down to 3-4 hours, people would use it. It would actually be faster than going to the airport for central Auckland, or anything further north.
But high speed lines are expensive, and NZ just doesn't have anywhere near the population density to justify it.
As for night trains, I'm pretty sure they can only exist where they are bridging multiple viable day train routes. Which is why that huge gap between Hamilton and Palmerston North is an issue.
And the route might actually be a bit short for a night train. If they electrified the entire distance (instead of using a diesel the whole way despite the fact 80% of the route is electrified) and did some improvements, they could probably get it down to an 8 hour trip.
> What about options for those living up north?
TBH, I'm not a fan of Auckland and don't really know what's going on with local public transport.
Churn of the user base could be playing a role in this, but I think it may not be too significant. In Europe there are multiple universities with HPC masters, which provide new users/devs to HPC. I worked with HPCs in New Zealand, and now I am doing the same in Spain. We hire multiple people from other HPC centers in Germany/UK/Italy, and equally lose people to those sites.
I think the field is actually increasing with AI, digital twins, more industry projects (CFD, oil, models for fisheries, simulations for health diseases, etc.).
I think hpc devs need an extra set of skills that are not so common. Such as parallel file systems, batch schedulers, NUMA, infiniband, and probably some domain-specific knowledge for the apps they will develop. This knowledge is also probably a bit niche, like climate modelling, earthquake simulation, lidar data processing, and so it goes.
And even knowing OpenMP or MPI may not suffice if the site uses older versions or heterogeneous approaches with CUDA, FPGA, etc. Knowing the language and the shared/distributed mem libs help, but if your project needs a new senior dev than it may be a bit hard to find (although popularity of company/HPC, salary, and location also play a role).
You tend to only learn these things as they become a problem too. That's super super domain specific and it doesn't always translate between areas of research.
So for e.g. when I did HPC simulation codes in magnetics, there was little point focusing on some of these areas because our codes were dominated by the long-range interaction cost which limited compute scaling. All of our effort was tuning those algorithms to the absolute max. We tried heterogenous CPU + GPU but had very mixed results, and at that time (2010s) the GPU memory wasn't large enough for the problems we cared about either.
I then moved to CFD in industry. The concerns there were totally different since everything is grid local. Partitioning over multi-GPU is simple since only the boundaries need to be exchanged on each iteration. The problems there were much more on the memory bandwidth and parallel file system performance side.
Basically, you have to learn to solve whatever challenges get thrown up by the specific domain problem.
> And even knowing OpenMP or MPI may not suffice if the site uses older versions
To be fair, you always have the option of compiling yourself, but most people I met in academia didn't have the background to do this. Spack and EasyBuild make this much much easier.
Seeing the comments, I think one thing missing is the availability of water. The authors mention it briefly, saying it's not part of the report,
> We focus primarily on temperature rather than precipitation or soil moisture, as water availability can be more readily controlled through human interventions, such as irrigation and paddy field construction.
Traditional rice cultivation normally involves flooding. So I am not sure how much one can rely on irrigation for rice. When I was younger, in Sao Paulo some Japanese immigrants were trying to raise Japanese rice species with flooding when I was young, but they gave up and moved to other crops as the weather in the southern area and Uruguay were better (that's what I was told growing up -- FWIW we had corn, sugarcane, orange until there was a huge pest in Barretos region, bamboo and lots of other fruits and veggies in the farm).
A couple of years ago my company (BSC in Spain) had an internal talk about impact of climate change in European vineyard. I don't remember the article they were talking about, but it was similar to this one: Climate change impacts and adaptations of wine production https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00521-5
From what I recall, what the researcher explained was that the change in water sources like rivers and lakes is already affecting wineries that are not able to grow certain crops due to the lack of water.
But due to the reduction in water levels, some wineries and types of grapes were not being able to be harvested in specific parts of Italy. The article above mentions something similar,
> Existing producers can adapt to a certain level of warming by changing plant material (varieties and rootstocks), training systems and vineyard management. However, these adaptations might not be enough to maintain economically viable wine production in all areas.
I guess there might be some genetic modification, and other techniques that do not require flooding and use less water. But that will likely affect small/medium producers, as well as and communities that depend on rice cultivation in certain areas.
Even with genetically modified rice, it might not be viable to bring water, or move families to other areas. So higher temperatures and the reduction of area that is suitable for harvesting rice might make genetically modifying rice useful only to a few.
I guess larger producers may be able to afford workarounds but that may increase cost to end users. Which is already a lot higher in Brazil than 10 years ago for normal and for the Japanese rice.
It is common in Python too. Reduces memory and eliminates stack errors in some cases. Althoughin Python I think the developer always needs to implement it and cannot rely on compiler/interpreter to optimize that.
I had fun working with QGIS some years ago, connecting it to GeoServer, mapserver, importing shapefiles, and customizing a few maps. I didn't use as much as the GIS engineers I worked with, but it was definitely a great open source tool.
I had to use ArcGIS too, and while sometimes it performed well, when it didn't it was quite painful to have to deal with the local vendor to implement our features, and troubleshoot bugs in their software.
The ArcGIS tile dataset is good, but the software had favorite versions of Adobe Acrobat to remain stable. It must have improved if people still use it =3
I think during the pandemic a lot of kiwis returned from overseas. Once it was over they slowly started migrating as the economy wasn't really good.
I did the same also to stay close to my wife's family for a few years before returning.
It is pretty common I'd say, not big news. And living here in Spain, apparently the exact same happens.
Young people normally study and work here. Many choose an Erasmus program or find job that pay 2 or 3 times more, especially in Germany, The Netherlands, Poland. We find it really difficult to hire good developers, especially seniors. Juniors are not too hard.
> We find it really difficult to hire good developers, especially seniors
From what I understand, Spain offers pitiful salaries even to senior developers. And prices for property in the areas where they're being hired are not cheap at all.
So decent developers have options, they can move to Ireland, Amsterdam, anywhere else in the EU where they can earn more.
Where instructions end up in this visualization depends heavily on the way instructions get encoded.
Because of that, I don’t think this visualization is useful for comparing instruction sets.
As an extreme example, take the ARM64 instruction set, but change the ordering of bits. That would completely change the visualization.
You might get something halfway informative by searching for the most similar image across all possible bit permutations in the instruction set. 64! is large, but that may be doable because hill climbing will (somewhat) work.
I don’t think it is desired, though. A good visualization starts with the question what you want to visualize, and chances are this isn’t the best way to visualize that answer.
I remember learning about IIIE (triple-I-efe) years ago while working with a computer vision researcher that used it to serve images generated with Jenkins pipelines.
Glad to see the project of server I used is still running well. The maintainer was a really nice person to work with too: https://cantaloupe-project.github.io/
It helped me that I was already familiar with some OGC & GIS tiling technologies, as what IIIF is doing is not too different. The image processing layer is different though, as you can zoom in, out, rotate, scale, etc..
There were several JavaScript clients, the one I used was one adopted by a museum, but I cannot recall the name now.
I think it is the first time I hear about a merge of two workflow tools.
I work with workflows and HPC, and the most common is multiple workflow managers in an hpc center, or even within a department. Which is not always necessary (sometimes it feels like just because there is budget and someone skilled they prefer to reinvent than reuse).
I hope this means that trend is stopping.
Another thing I hope I will start seeing more are workflow managers sharing libraries. Most workflow managers need to handle similar tasks like submitting tasks to cloud, slurm, containers. Or even performing graph operations, visualizing graphs.
Workflow managers are the ultimate wheel to be reinvented. Everyone needs some form of them, they're reasonably easy to implement a poorly working version of, and everyone thinks that they can do it better. In the data engineering world there are literally dozens of solutions that are essentially "airflow, packaged slightly differently"
I think this could be a variable to contribute to a good coverage and infrastructure... but there are probably more factors involved.
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