Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Despite leaving Seattle twenty minutes early, my flight got stacked at Heathrow and ended up arriving 20 minutes or so late. The process of going through electronic passport control was pretty painless — less so for non-EU nations, where the process was manual — and I picked up my bag and got through customs quickly enough to make it to the lift to the station with one of the crew from my flight.

Attempting to buy a ticket for the journey to Paddington, I noticed that all the most prominent options were for the Heathrow Express. Initially I accidentally selected one but I realised my mistake when I saw the eye-watering price of 23 pounds for a bare 15 minute journey — surely only someone with serious jet lag and a complete lack of knowledge of the value of the pound would opt for such a thing! Hunting around, I found the Heathrow Connect option which, at a merely wince-inducing 10 pounds for 25 minutes, represents considerably better value for money. Even more so because, when I got to the platform, I found that the next Connect was in three minutes and next Express was due in 10, completely nullifying the difference in journey time.

Getting to Paddington at around 12:30, I decided not to wait until two for the train I'd booked a seat on and instead I hopped on the next one bound for the westcountry. After what seemed a very short journey — it took me almost exactly the same time to get to Exeter as it took me to get from Redmond to SeaTac — I was back at St Davids and it was just 25 minute walk — albeit uphill and 20kg of baggage — home. Fortunately, the weather was dry, it was definitely warmer than Seattle, and after spending the last 22 hours in transit, I felt like I needed a chance to stretch my legs.

So that's it: home safe after a fun but ultimately pretty uneventful trip. Now all I have to do is resync my body clock, currently 8 hours out of alignment, with British Summer Time...

It being a Saturday, I felt more than a little guilty at missing parkrun so I went out for an extra long morning run. I didn't quite make it to Chateau Sainte Michelle, but I was pretty close by the time I turned back to return to Redmond. During the run I saw a bald eagle flying fairly low over the river. I wasn't entirely surprised — I'd seen something that looked like an awful lot like an eyrie on one of the power pylons — but it was still a pretty damn awesome thing to see!

After spending the morning exploring Redmond Old Town and the Saturday Market — conveniently located in the same place as the mini version staged for CUG — I decided to walk the four or so miles to the local branch of Vertical World. Despite getting mildly lost on the way — I turned right instead of left and found myself at the start of the powerline trail which I'd run a few days ago — I located the centre in an industrial building tucked away at the back.

After signing in — a guy sitting on a bench by entry said, "After going through all that, you ought to have clearance to meet the president!" — I hired some rather slippy shoes — this is not to dis Vertical World: using someone else's shoes is always a bad experience — and got on with some bouldering. After going through a warm-up, which was enough to persuade me I needed a chalk bag — which they lent me for free! — I worked up to the point where I crushed a bunch of their V5s. I'm not entirely surprised because it matches comfort zone, but you never know how one centre's grading is going to carry over to another and if you're not familiar with the house style, it sometimes takes a while to get to the point where you can send stuff with confidence.

I didn't try any routes because I didn't notice that they had auto-belays until I'd signed in for bouldering. But when I checked the grades and attempting a quick conversion from YDS to French grades, I decided I probably wasn't missing anything and stuck with my original plan. After putting a few hours, I started to feel tired. Acutely aware of the walk home — which, coming on top of the morning's run, was definitely a contributing factor to the tiredness — I called it a day and headed back to the hotel where I started repacking my stuff for the return to the UK.

The first part of the final day was not terribly edifying: a panel on data analytics and HPC; a combination about which I find myself somewhat sceptical. The morning sessions featured a presentation on Caribou by Craig Flaskerud followed by a presentation on encouraging users to tune their codes for Knight's Landing on Cori at NERSC. I can't remember which talk I went to third: it obviously didn't create a great deal of impact!

After a quick lunch, TL took himself off to the airport, reverse his journey on public transport. Meanwhile the guys from EC hung around until mid-afternoon before hopping in a taxi to take them to SeaTac.

With people starting to thin out, I went to an interesting set of sessions on system regression testing. In the first case, this involved using Jenkins to drive a series of test of jobs. In the second, it involved a custom Python framework developed by CSCS and, again, deployed through Jenkins to allow them to confirm the correctness and performance of their systems both routinely and after system maintenance.

In the second session of the afternoon, I followed the IO track, and attended an extremely interesting talk on tuning HDF5 IO based on the number of tasks writing to each file. The second talk was about simulating the IO patterns of an application which contained sensitive elements which prevented it from being used by external benchmarkers. The third session was an intriguing piece of blue-skies thinking from Cray about the future of file systems; the gist of which seemed to be that a great deal of our current performance problems come from the need to support a strict POSIX interface.

With that done, there was time for a short talk from someone from Shared Services Canada — the Canadian government's IT department! — before the close of the conference and the distribution of various bits and pieces that the organises claimed they didn't want to take home with them! With the day at an end, I got talking to the SSC person about experiences with Cray and with the Power 7 — they're just in the process of migrating off their IBM. I also discovered that he hadn't been able to confirm his travel until a few days before and been forced to find a hotel some distance from the Marriott, with the consequence that he'd been accumulating taxi fees of around $50 a day. Ouch!

Having made it back to the Marriott with my camera, I jumped on one of the buses and found myself whisked off to Seattle. On the journey out I found myself sitting next to Arno Kolster who, until very recently had worked for a well-known payment company, working on low-latency methods of fraud detection. He was politely interested in what I had to say — I lapsed into my usual spiel mode — and when I gave him a chance to get a word in edgewise, he had interesting perpectives on how enterprise computing copes with its needs both for high availability and rapid data analysis. He's giving what sounds like it's going to be an interesting keynote tomorrow.

After half an hour or so — including a very scenic trip across Lake Washington, complete with a regatta of small to moderate sized yachts — the bus took us past the impressive sight of Safeco Field and it's enormous retractable roof — currently open — and down 1st Ave South to the Living Computer Museum in SoDo.

The ground floor — first, if you're American — contained a small, ersatz bar and a series of interesting exhibits on robotics and the history of computing. As with Sunday's event, I spent most of the first part of the evening fending off offers of meaty snacks and endless Dungeness crab cakes — a name which confused me no end until I discovered Dungeness, WA was a distinct and different place from Dungeness in Kent!

Suitably plied with drinks and snacks, we then gathered round the far end of the floor to listen to museum directory Lath Carlson talk about the place's history and to reveil some new exhibits. The first was the Cray 1 which had until recently been on display at Cray's offices in St Paul and which had now been placed on permanent exhibition at the museum:



Unfortunately the machine has had too many parts removed to allow it to be restored, but it's still an imposing and beautiful piece of equipment.

The second addition of the night was just as exciting: a complete Cray 2. Introducing the machine, Carlson said, "The machine is complete and we hope to get it up and running as a living machine. But we're going to need to upgrade the building's power supply first... Which I guess is fairly common, because I'm hearing a lot of knowing laughter out there..."



Upstairs, in the lab area, were a superb series of vintage computers. Although to my mind, as an HPC version, the Crays are the most iconic machines in the collection, the IBM S/360 looks more like the classic 1960s notion of a computer:



But the really big beast of the museum has got to be the CDC 6600 — the first true supercomputer, also partly the brainchild of Seymour Cray in his Control Data days.



The curator responsible for doing maintenance on the machine showed us a module from the 6600 and described the process of disassembling it to access and replace some of the transistors — yes, you read that right: transistors! — used by the machine. (ETA: Back in the UK, I discussed this with MI who worked for CDC in Canada and he said, "Yeah, back in those days you needed real skill to be a hardware engineer...")

As the evening wore on, we headed back downstairs for a buffet which, although meat-and-fish heavy, featured a superb range of local cheeses. A few of us got talking to one of the curators about the museum's outreach program and discussed the problem of the lack of women in STEM.

The curator pointed out that things hadn't always been quite so imbalanced: the museum had a display of early Barbies sets which showed the iconic doll working with a series of computers with, in each case, the set paired up with the actual machine Barbie was using.

They also noted that in their robotics outreach programs, although the kids' initial responses were in-line with gender stereotypes: they split into groups, with boys wanting to do something completely impossible like make the robot fly, the girls were initially more sceptical until they understood the purpose of the exercise, at which point they'd usually solve the problem — unlike they boys who'd become dejected when they couldn't achieve their unrealistic goal — and then, on the second day of the event, the gender boundaries would dissolve and the girls and boys would be more likely to work together to finish their assigned project.

At the end of the evening, after picking up a rather nice commemorative t-shirt, we got back on the buses and made the return trip to Redmond.

Woke up at around 4am and pottered around for a little while waiting for the sun to rise before taking myself out running. I ran a slightly uncertain route to downtown Redmond — my Garmin shows a very wiggly track — before reaching the Sammamish River Trail. I struck out down the trail — a lovely, flat route where I encountered a number of early joggers and few eager cyclists making their way to work. On the way back, I saw a tall, fast, Viking figure powering towards me. Naturally, it was TL out for his morning run; but unlike me, he'd come directly from the Marriott whereas I had an extra couple of kilometres to get back to the Redmond Inn.

Meeting CW for breakfast in our hotel, we walked to the conference and settled in for the morning sessions. Having attended the CLE6 tutorials last year and doubting whether there was likely to be anything new, I instead opted for NERSC's shifter session. The technology was interesting, not least because it solves many of the python performance problems seen on Lustre systems, and there were some interesting tricks to allow the containers to make use of hardware specific libraries on Aries systems.

The afternoon was taken up with a tutorial session on analytics and machine learning. The analytics part involved a series of sessions using Apache Spark on Cori with a range of different language bindings. There was an interesting mention of using conda to manage python installations and a session on R — Cray have added version enhanced to use their tuned versions of the BLAS libraries to their libsci bundle — followed by an overview of Cray Graph Engine which, while no doubt deeply fascinating, was rendered almost entirely incomprehensible by an abrupt attack of jet lag. The rest of the afternoon is so shrouded in exhaustion that I can't remember a thing about the rest of the session.

The evening's event was a version of Redmond's Saturday Market complete with food stands, a band — Acoustic Transitions — and an ice cream stand. As the night wore on, I had reason to regret my decision to wear a t-shirt: the wind grew increasingly cutting and I was eventually forced to cuddled up with one of the patio heaters to avoid freezing.

After scrubbing off the parkrun mud, I spent the morning picking up the last few essentials ahead of my trip. With everything packed, I set off for the station in good time to get the train to Paddington. The journey was smooth, I arrived on time, and caught the tube to Chalk Farm arriving at my uncle's in time for tea.

We went out to Jamon Jamon in Belsize Park, where the food was as excellent as ever. The only minor mishap was their inability to apply a 20 per cent discount card after the bill had been printed. The waiter explained at some length that, thanks to a till upgrade, they were now only able to apply discounts before they finalised the bill. In the end, I think this may have been a blessing in disguise: far better to apply the discount to a larger meal — one, say, involving my parents and their heroic capacity for food — than dinner for two.

After raining all night, it was still raining this morning when I left for the station. Running slightly late, I rushed down to St Davids and arrived very wet but just in time to catch my train. The rain kept up as we headed north-east and the low-lying land around the train was starting to edge under water. It was much better in Bristol and by the time I'd reached the Midlands, the stations had warnings up about wet floors and slip hazards.

Arriving in a lull, I walked the short distance to my sister's without getting too wet, and she gave me a lift in the car. The rest of the afternoon was astonishingly wet — I think the rain band must have followed me — and from the news I learnt of narrow escape: the rail lines to Taunton and Yeovil closed; Bristol Temple Meads temporarily closed due to overcrowding; and minor flooding in Exeter.

Up early to sort out my packing, I had a shower and finally managed to get out early enough to take a pre-dawn shot of Telendos — something Izzy had been wanting to do all week. The weather was clear enough to give a good view of Leros to the north and to give a hint of something else — surely not Patmos? — in the very far distance.


Returning to the hotel, I went down to breakfast with the others where we settled up our breakfast bills and I arranged for a taxi to take my to Kalymnos airport. While we were waiting around, Tom came by to pick up Andrew for a morning of climbing, bringing the news that Gav had crashed his scooter the previous night, picking up some nasty road rash in the process. Sure enough the man himself arrived a little later, looking suitably banged up, to take Izzy up to Iliada for a final attempt on Lucky Luca.

The taxi arrived at around nine and Eve and I got in. The taxi dropped Eve in Myrties, where she was going to meet up with Hayley with the idea of spending the morning in Pothia ahead of the ferry, and then continued on up the mountain to the airport. It was very cold and windy when we arrived and the taxi driver gave me his card, telling me to give him a ring if my flight was cancelled and I needed a lift to the ferry port; something, he warned me, that had happened before.

The small terminal building was surprisingly busy, with a large extended Greek-Australian family, some locals, and a few Americans, all waiting for our plane to land. Around 40 minutes before the plane was due to depart, it became clear that conditions were too windy for a landing and were all being re-routed via Kos. I got my ticket changed, jumped in a taxi with the Americans, and was soon at Pothia ferry port. There I bumped into Gaz Parry, who pointed me to the ferry kiosk where I bought a ticket — the man behind the counter wasn't fooled by my bad greek for a second!

Once the ferry started boarding, I went and sat in the cabin where I got talking to one of the Australians. She said they'd been in Kalymnos to visit her mother-in-law's grave and they were supposed to be heading to Kalamata for a wedding. They'd tried to leave on yesterday's flight, only to be stopped by the wind, and they'd decided that it was better to go from Kos than to risk being stuck in Kalynos for another day. As we were talking, I got a surprise when Hayley wandered through the cabin. It turned out that she and Eve and Andrew, who'd stormed his climbs this morning, were all up on the top deck. I went up and joined them for the rest of the journey, catching a final shot of the island as we were leaving.


Arriving in Masticheri on Kos, where the wind was strong enough to throw spray over the breakwater, we joined forces with Gaz and one of his group to share taxis to the airport. Once their, the girls soon disappeared off for their flight, leaving the three of us to await our five o'clock flight to Athens.

Once check-in was open, we went through the process of getting our bags through and our seats allocated. Andrew and Gaz, who were catching their scheduled flight, breezed through with no trouble. Whereas I, when I tried, got told to go to the Aegean Airlines desk to get my ticket fixed. On initially presenting my ticket, the woman on the counter told me I needed to go to check-in. Once I convinced her I wasn't in the wrong place, she made a few phone calls, told me everything was fine and sent me back to the desk. Bypassing the queue, I tried again, only to discover that there was still a problem. There then followed a few frenzied bouts of typing by the women on the desk, following by one of them going over to the Aegean desk, followed by more typing and lots of rapid phone calls in Greek. After half an hour or forty minutes of this, during which I'd been blocking the check-in queue, they finally fixed the problem, slapped a quick transfer tag on my bag and pushed me through into departures where I met up with a very baffled Andrew.

The flight was very smooth and we arrived in Athens in well under an hour. We made it through the airport in good time to get to the departure gate for the flight to Heathrow and we left around twenty minutes behind schedule. After a fairly smooth flight with only minor turbulence, we arrived in London at around 9pm local time where, much to my surprise, I found my bag waiting for me on the carousel.

I said my goodbyes to Andrew, who was off to catch the bus to Woking, and caught the Piccadilly Line to Leicester Square where I changed to get myself to Chalk Farm. I arrived at my uncle's an hour and a half later, tired but extremely pleased to have made it back to England — there were moments during the afternoon when I doubted I'd ever get back.

After a slightly slow start this morning — some people were clearly still recoverying from the excesses of yesterday's cocktails! — we scootered out to the crag, skipping the usual supermarket stop on the way.

Once up there, Izzy and I were planning to warm up on Mikrotera Kalamarakia but ended doing Haryvdi because it was free. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a total nightmare. Izzy took two goes to get up to the second clip after having serious worries about just how polished the bottom part of the route was. I seconded and confirmed her opinion: the bottom was like glass and without good feet, the second clip felt very exposed.

After the horrors of that, I belayed her on Haryvdi and went off to lead Nausicaa Nausicaa. The long slab route was really charming and enjoyable with good feet and some non-obvious hands. Partway up I encountered someone climbing Mon Amour who seemed to be in a bad position: off her route, without an obvious bolt to clip to, and with a big fall looming if she feel off. It turned out that the person who put the draws in the route had skipped a bolt and she'd got lost as a result, so I clipped her into one of my bolts until she lowered to a safe point, unclipped her, and carried on with my route.

Eve on Nausicaa Nausicaa:


The main aim for the day was to allow Hayley to take a crack at The Beast, which she'd stormed on top rope last year. She warmed up with Imia:


And because the route shares an anchor with The Beast, she was able to put quickdraws in the harder route on her way down. With everything set, she then began her assault on the 7b:


After Hayley redpointed it, Andrew decided to give it a go too:


While this was going on, I seconded a short, very boulder 6b+ with some serious coaching from Tom. The route featured a couple of crossover moves in the middle, which involved shifting from one layback position to another, with a powerful move through a big tufa formation in the middle. It took me a few goes to get, but once I'd cracked the crux, I stormed the last section. Later in the day I was gratified to see a couple of Australians climbing it and making a horrible mess of it — certainly my Newberry-assisted beta was far more elegant — and basically thrashing their way up.

Once I'd finished the 6b+, I gave Imia a crack, making it a fair way up the route before running out of beans. I ended the afternoon with Odisseo, which I quite enjoyed, even though I didn't quite top it but instead interrupted Gav's conversation with Hayley about falling by chucking myself off.

We finished the day in Marci Marc cave, with Izzy almost topping Lucky Luca. She panicked when her feet were in the wrong position on the very last move and failed to clip the anchor, but the other moves looked super smooth. Andrew powered up Amphora, finishing it with an amazingly slick bit of clipping: he popped a quickdraw off his harness, clipped it to the anchor, clipped the rope, clipped the rope into the anchor, unclipped the rope from the QD, unclipped the draw and had it back on his gear loop in one completely seemless movement; it was pure poetry in motion.

After finishing up, we went back down for showers before heading to Prego for dinner. I went for a really good pappardella alla norma made with local Kalymnian goat cheese. I'm pretty sure that Andrew went for pasta and I have a feeling Izzy went for some sort of seafood, but I can't really remember what the others went for.

Out for my usual early morning walk, I got as far as Myrties before I decided to return to the hotel. Inevitably this was the point at which the heavens decided to open and I found myself pretty soaked by the time I got home. Fortunately, the temperature was already in the high twenties and I was dry before I knew it.

After breakfast, we hopped on the scooters and made our way to Grande Grotta.


Neither Izzy nor I enjoyed our warm up on happy girlfriend — a slab route with some easy tufa climbing that neither of us particularly enjoyed. I tried to lead monahiki elia, had an attack of nerves, came down to allow Izzy to lead it, and then powered up it on top rope.

Hayley stormed up taz, climbing head to head with someone else working their way up monahiki elia:


Moving round the corner to Afternoon, we did l'amico ralph, blu, kalo taxidi and l'uomo che non credeva. Here's Gav on the 6b:


Hayley and Andrew finished the day with clare, a tough 6c, and called it a day — although I think Izzy may have been jonesing for one last climb.

We went to Prego, the restaurant directly below the hotel, for supper. The food was very good and the portions large enough that Tom was able to forego his usual post-supper gyros. I had the vegan special, falafel with hummus and pita bread, while Izzy had seafood pasta, Hayley had a seafood platter, Andrew had chicken pasta, and Tom had a giant plate of cutlets.