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.