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Nutanix, a leader in software for private, hybrid and multicloud computing, recently assisted two Computer Science honours students from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, with the provision of the infrastructure needed to support the completion of their final honours practical.
The students, Brooke Stewart and Christina Spanellis, were given access to an Ubuntu Virtual machine with 3 8 Intel Xeon Gold 6254 CPUs @ 3.10GHz. and 32GB RAM from Nutanix Labs on which to run their project titled “Evolving Robot Bodies and Brains – a Computer Science Honours project investigating the impact of a complexity cost and environmental complexity on artificially evolved robots”. Based on the results of their findings and the calibre of their final assignment, the all-female team were both awarded the BSG prize for the best Honours project at UCT.
“Our project had unforeseen challenges. One of which was the fact that we needed to extend the capabilities of the simulator for us to be able to run our revolutions,” said Stewart. “Another challenge was that we needed to run our computationally expensive, lengthier simulations on a high-performance computing cluster.
“However, our project code was in C++, meaning it needs to be compiled where one intends to run it. In short, our project had multiple dependencies and required multiple external libraries, when all added together it means that the process itself would be an exceptionally time-consuming task. We realised too late that we did not have the admin privileges required to install what was needed on the clusters, meaning that we wouldn’t have been able to complete the project within the time available,” she added.