Farewell Austin

My turn to host the final beer tasting on the Sunday night. We had a beer with a witch's face on it, whose name now escapes me, followed by Tripel Karmeliet, both also pretty reasonable. We were going to meet up with the Dell guys later that evening to see a blues guitarist of some repute: Alan Haynes. We played it safe and ate in the hotel, which turned out to be reasonably priced.

Upon arrival at the venue we couldn't get in, and it didn't seem that busy. Eventually we found it was the staff Thanksgiving party, so their website had it all wrong about Alan Haynes. There was plenty of other live music to choose from, so we met the Dell guys and made decision. This is the first band.
It was OK but totally dominated by the harmonica player and they had trouble staying in time with each other.

We could see another band setting up across the street so decided to try that one out. There is no cover charge at most places so swapping around was not an expensive proposition. The place was almost empty so we got front row seats. Once these guys started playing, the place started filling up.

From the first song, it was much better. No dominant Harmonica and they kept it tight so immediately it was an improvement. The lead guitarist on the left was pretty good and drummer and keyboard players were old pros. The bass guitarist was a worry. I'm pretty sure he thought he was Angus from ACDC, but he had a whole lot of tongue action going on for one song, so was also channeling someone from Kiss as well. The lead guitarist was something else. He had all the moves:

I think again this was a case of thinking I was a bit more than an amateur photographer.  When I left early I was acknowledged as I left. I wanted to stay, but we were leaving the next day and I had to pack in the morning. Phil Laxton who is a bit of guitarist himself stayed on longer. He really appreciated the band and is responsible for all the whistling you hear in the videos. I need to work out how to adjust the default sound levels for the videos. They were maxed out the whole time and of course this results in the distorted sound. Decent video coming soon. Here's one that is small enough to upload as is. I really needed a tripod.

The next morning we had breakfast with Dell and a guy from DPI in Victoria. He was also there last night and I need to send him some of my photos as his iPhone was not cutting it in the dark. We then got a couple of Ubers for the 6 of us headed out to Dell. They showed us some of their engineering vertical solutions.

After some presentations we got another couple of Ubers and headed down the road to TACC. I was in an F150 - a roomy, true American experience. They pay far too little for petrol over there!

We toured the facility. They have more than one HPC installation. The first and largest one is called stampede and is multiple hot aisle contained pods of this sort of length. I'm in a cold aisle.

They also have some newer alternative architectures:

They are trialing some cool technologies (excuse the pun):

The above 2 shots show the oil cooling trial with a mostly empty vat in the first one and some storage on the left and blades on the right in the 2nd.

We then took an Uber to the airport and went through the checkin and not too unreasonable security process. There was not too much of a queue on a Monday at 3:00pm. We had time to grab a late lunch before our flights. Again the food wasn't too expensive. The decor was a worry. We were sitting in a bar decorated in honor of a Texan football player called Earl Campbell. This was OK in an American way, but the fact that this guy played in the 70s and 80s seemed a bit dated.

For me a 3 hour trip to LAX with plenty of time in between it and my International flight to Brisbane. I must have been tired. I misread the board, which was difficult to read compared to what I saw at Brisbane airport, and sat at the wrong gate for ages. Eventually I worked it out and had a stroll down the other end. I was lucky the long day made sleeping on the home leg a bit easier.

Austin, The Weird Town

Because of the University and companies that have research headquarters here, Austin is a bit different. There is a local campaign/slogan called Keep Austin Weird. As a result of this it has a pretty amazing blues scene going on. And apparently is not like the rest of Texas at all.

We had lunch at a local place and went for a walk along the Colorado River. I was a bit worn out after that. With the combination of head cold and long walk I ended up crashing for a couple of hours, before waking up and feeling terrible.

That night we tried another couple of beers in Richards hotel room. We had the Terrible and the Delirium Nocturnes, both very good. I had been thinking about staying in but began to feel a bit better. After that we went to The Ginger Man a local bar that has over a hundred beers on tap. We tried a Dankosaurus IPA and a Maredsous 8 that were on tap, good and great. They also have a big range in bottles.

We then went looking for dinner in 6th Street. It was late by then and most places at stopped serving food so we ended up at the Parkside Restaurant again. Richard wanted a shot of our waitress.

It was even later after that but 6th Street was still nuts.

There were plenty of college girls around. These 3 thought I was a professional photographer and insisted I take their photo even after multiple denials. Later that night I saw quite a few professional photographers snapping people and handing out cards. You know who this shot is for don't you!

We tried 2 different clubs. One had a DJ, the other a band.

I tried some videos to see how the camera would handle it.

Sunday we took it easy. I felt seedy until around 11:30 and the cold was progressing. We had lunch at Mai Thai and the food was pretty similar to Australian Thai. We started with an included Tom Kha soup. I had Pad See Mao and it was pretty close to the dish they serve in Canberra at the local Yarralumla Thai place. Richard had a satay dish called peanut sauce.

SC15 Game Over

Wednesday I attended the panel Supercomputing and Big Data: From Collision to Convergence and unfortunately after that a few vendor briefings meant I missed most of the conference sessions I wanted to see. I was also a bit tired so wandered the exhibition floor for a while as it was less taxing than the sessions. In the evening the Mellanox event featured food, drink and stand up session from Jason Alexander (Seinfeld) that was very funny.

Thursday I attended the keynote given by the under secretary for Science and Energy 2015 Quadrennial Technology Review:

The large screen technology they use at this conference is amazing.
He spoke a lot about the different energy mixes and where it was going. They seem to be further ahead than Australia with alternatives. At the end he showed a few 3D printed cars ranging from very Lego like efforts to the final one looks pretty cool to me. It has an electric engine in it.

After that there was a talk on Earthquake simulation: Societal Impact of Earthquake Simulations at Extreme Scale. As the models improved people started taking thinks more seriously. Building standards are changing and they are making some owners retrofit poorly designed buildings. They are also practicing responses to disaster scenarios to work out what they need to do better to be prepared.

I attended another couple of talks that were thinly disguised vendor pitches. They were still interesting. During the lunch break I wandered the exhibition floor again and checked out the booth of one the vendors who has just talked. I was just a fraction late getting to the first session after lunch and could not get in because the room was full so I wandered the poster displays instead and found a couple that might be of use. I made sure I was early for the next session and it was also packed.

Chris from IBM was leaving the following day so we helped him finish a Belgian Ale he had to get rid of. Richard brought one and so did I. We had de garre, Kwak, and Trois Pistoles and decided to look up ratebeer.com to see where they were in the classifications. They were all up about 90, but the Rochefort 8 and 10 were on 100. The Rochefort 6 was 98.

After that the Dell guys took us out to dinner in 6th Street, since it was Richard's birthday.

By the time we left the restaurant the street was closed with cops everywhere and people into full on party mode. We walked to the Coyote Ugly bar a block further down the street. I was bit slow getting the camera out, sorry horses.

Inside the bar we met up with a whole bunch of Intel Lustre Engineers. They were into punching things and cigars:

The bar itself was not that great. They were only there because they could smoke the cigars on the balcony.

The bar was at the end of the closed off portion of the street.

We headed back down the street looking for a live music venue once the cigars were finished. By this time 12:40am the place was really rocking.  They ended up going into the Dueling piano bar pictured above. Richard said he was going in to say goodbye. I knew better. He ended up doing shots with them. I called it a night so I could get to the final workshop of the conference the next day.

I met up with Richard for lunch. We ordered coffee at the end of the meal and it was pretty bad. In fact I have not had a decent coffee since leaving Australia. After lunch we walked a bit further to another Whole Foods Market. This was a lot bigger than the first one we tried. The beer range was tempting so we bought a few more. These are my 3 and I found another flavour corn chip to try.

I then spent some time writing up some some of the sessions and taking it easy. We sampled the Timmermans and one of Richard's from the same brewery as Trois Pistoles, Don De Dieu, before heading out to P.F. Changs, a Chinese Restaurant Food Chain. The food was OK - lots of meat and not much vegetables. We tried the Mongolian Beef and Asian Grilled Salmon dishes.

Saturday morning and I've woken up with a head cold. Just after breakfast a lot of music from outside the hotel peaked my interest. I had noticed a lot of Indian people dressed in colourful clothes in the hotel foyer.  I grabbed my camera and headed back down. There were more in the lift dressed in their best outfits, one of whom informed me it was a wedding. This is my first video on the new camera. Hmmm, maybe not just yet for here.  I need to reduce the filesize as 100MB is the limit. I did take one still.

The Juggernaut that is SC

Sunday I attend the First International Workshop on Heterogeneous Computing with Reconfigurable Logic in the morning

followed by the IBM GPFS User Group Meeting. I don't have photos of the GPFS user group meeting as they made us sign an NDA at the door. In the end there was no NDA material that I could see in there. It looked like half the attendees were from IBM. Even so I was surprised at the numbers. I skipped breakfast and lunch so was keen for dinner. That evening we went to a sushi bar that was close. Jake Carroll from the Queensland Brain Institute at UQ came along. He gets to a lot of international conferences and had met Elon Musk. Richard was intrigued. We ordered a couple of sushi boats which came with a selection of things to try. It was OK. What can I say, I'm not a sushi person.

Monday we had breakfast with Mellanox first up.

Monday was another workshop day. I attended parts of the Tenth Workshop on Parallel Data Storage. The keynote was pretty cool - holographic storage is coming - hopefully. http://akoniaholographics.com/ There were a couple of Dell briefings during the day back at our hotel.
In the evening Intel made some announcements.

This is the front half of the room before it was filled. Not everybody would have been there as the conference proper does not start until the Tuesday.

There was a function afterwards in the exhibition hall but we had organised a dinner with Bright Computing and Dell. They took us to a nice place called Trulucks

Richard and I felt pretty seedy the next day, but we both managed to make it to the Plenary, given by Alan Alda.

He is an advocate for Science and talked about how most scientists are poor communicators and suggested how they could do better, and how important that is to society. After this we had a briefing with nVidia at a hotel a few blocks from the convention center. We grabbed some brunch at a crepe place that was local and then headed back to conference proper. I managed to get to the exibition for the first time. It was overwhelming.

The above photo shows the overhead row numbers receding into the distance. The one below shows a more aerial view.

 This is a floor plan of the exhibition hall.


Something a little topical: A German University simulation of diesel injection and the turbulent flow caused by nozzle tip geometry. Apparently VW don't simulate this process and just try lots of prototypes. The guy talking to me thought his job prospects were good!

That evening we attended a Cray function and did some networking with other conference goers.