In August last year I gave a talk at the 2017 HPC Advisory Council conference in Perth, where I showed some of work I had been doing on optimising a seismic code for large scale seismic wave propagation simulations at The University of Western Australia. It was the first time I had organised some volunteers to help me demonstrate a point, with some hilarious results!
The performance enhancements I contributed amounted to a factor of 2x increase in the performance of the code. This ended up saving our research group about 4 million core hours of compute time. In this talk I also do a direct comparison between the performance of AWS cloud computing nodes and the Pawsey Supercomputer Magnus.