Dask Down Under

Executive Summary

Dask Down Under was a special event held for the first time last month during the 2021 Dask Summit. It featured talks, tutorials, and events tailored specifically for an Australian (and wider Oceania) audience.

To get involved in the new Pangeo Oceania community group, register your interest here.

What is Dask Down Under?
Who came?
Watch the talks
What’s next? Here’s how to get involved!

What is Dask Down Under?

Dask down under is a chance for everyone in Oceania to forge links and build community here in our backyard. Dask down under we feature talks, tutorials and panel discussions on using Dask to accelerate research. All levels from beginner to expert are encouraged to attend.

Dask Down Under involved two days of events:

5 talks
2 tutorials
1 panel discussion
1 meet and greet networking event

Who came?

There was a strong geoscience theme across Dask Down Under. This reflects the strong scientific community we have in these areas. People came from government organisations, universities, and industry.

We expected most attendees would be based in the Asia-Pacific region, since those were the timezones targeted by these events.

Unexpectedly, we also saw a lot of extra traffic at the talks on day one, likely from US timezones. Publicity from Dask Summit emails and tweets mentioning Dask Down Under resulted in a lot of people stopping by to watch. This more than doubled our live attendance during the first event. It was great to see so much interest coming from other parts of the world, too.

Watch the talks

You can watch the talks and tutorials from the Dask Dwon Under workshop on the Dask youtube channel. The full playlist for the workshop is available here.

Panel discussion

A panel discussion was held, bringing together a diverse group of users from novice to expert, academic to commercial. We hope this discussion will start a conversation about using Dask in Australia, how we build our community, contribute and stay in touch with the rest of the world. You can watch it here:

Moderator: Draga Doncila Pop
Panelists:

Ben Leighton, CSIRO
Tisham Dhar, Geoscience Australia
Genevieve Buckley, Dask life science fellow
Hugo Bowne-Anderson, Coiled

Invited talks

The full playlist for the workshop is available here.

Featured talks include:

Draga Doncila Pop, Interactive visualization and near real-time analysis on out-of-core satellite images
Tisham Dhar: Dask DevOps for Remote Sensing
Kirill Kouzoubov: Patterns for large scale temporal processing of geo-spatial data using Dask
Ben Leighton and Kim Opie: Image Processing Using Dask - Using dask and skimage to identity vegetation morphology across the Australian landscape
Nick Mortimer: Making the most of your schedule: From HPC to Local Cluster

What’s next?

Here’s how you can get involved:

Several people have discussed setting up a new Pangeo Oceania group. You can register your interest here.

> Soon we'll start holding regular Pangeo Oceania meetups for sharing information, support, training, and workflow advocacy across our region.  We look forward to you helping to shape the Pangeo Oceania community. And if you have a friend or colleague that should be here too, please share this sign-up link: http://bit.ly/Pangeo_email_signup

The Python for Atmosphere and Ocean Science (PyAOS) provides information and resources to the user community: https://pyaos.github.io/ To keep the site up-to-date, the first ever PyAOS census is being conducted. It would be great if Python users in the atmosphere and/or ocean science community could take a few minutes to fill out the survey. https://forms.gle/L84W7bsxmP86G3Ji9