![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylLast night's change in the weather was still making itself felt this morning: the temperature had dropped dramatically overnight and there was thick mist all along the river trail. Not that it was enough to put people off: in addition to the usual cyclists and joggers, I passed a group kayaking their way downstream to Lake Washington.
Today's conference opener was a plenary session from Douglas Kothe of Oak Ridge, which managed to cover all the usual bases of a high performance computing conference. For these things have an established form: a discussion of why we need N-scale computing, where N has shifted over the years from tera- to peta- to exa- with the relentless advance of Moore's Law; a skim over a series of classic physics problems, all of which will benefit from improved computing resolution, many of which seem to involve fission and fusion reaction models, and most of which are being worked on by colleagues of the speaker; and finally a call for more money for N-scale computing and an endorsement of why Vendor X is perfectly placed to do it. Regardless of my slightly cynical take on things, Kothe was a good speaker and his talk was engaging and important for someone to stand up and really sell the benefits of faster, bigger, and better computing.
The rest of the morning was taken up by a Cray corporate update. The less said about that, the better.
The afternoon was a bit more promising with a decent technical session covering everything from remote support to Thomas' paper on using XDMoD to run accounting analytics — an interesting bit of work, even though I say so myself. I then went to a session on Spack — a package manager about which I knew precisely nothing — a good presentation on system regression testing at KAUST, and something on tracing python usage at Blue Waters to determine who was using what and how heavily.
I skipped the BoFs — choices included programming environments, burst buffers, XC system management, or a discussion with the CUG Board — in favour of walking back to the hotel to drop off my laptop and pick up my camera ahead of the evening event at the Living Computer Museum — something so awesome it deserves its own post.
Today's conference opener was a plenary session from Douglas Kothe of Oak Ridge, which managed to cover all the usual bases of a high performance computing conference. For these things have an established form: a discussion of why we need N-scale computing, where N has shifted over the years from tera- to peta- to exa- with the relentless advance of Moore's Law; a skim over a series of classic physics problems, all of which will benefit from improved computing resolution, many of which seem to involve fission and fusion reaction models, and most of which are being worked on by colleagues of the speaker; and finally a call for more money for N-scale computing and an endorsement of why Vendor X is perfectly placed to do it. Regardless of my slightly cynical take on things, Kothe was a good speaker and his talk was engaging and important for someone to stand up and really sell the benefits of faster, bigger, and better computing.
The rest of the morning was taken up by a Cray corporate update. The less said about that, the better.
The afternoon was a bit more promising with a decent technical session covering everything from remote support to Thomas' paper on using XDMoD to run accounting analytics — an interesting bit of work, even though I say so myself. I then went to a session on Spack — a package manager about which I knew precisely nothing — a good presentation on system regression testing at KAUST, and something on tracing python usage at Blue Waters to determine who was using what and how heavily.
I skipped the BoFs — choices included programming environments, burst buffers, XC system management, or a discussion with the CUG Board — in favour of walking back to the hotel to drop off my laptop and pick up my camera ahead of the evening event at the Living Computer Museum — something so awesome it deserves its own post.
