ICCS Conference Cairns, Dead Cat Dreams

Arrived in Cairns on Monday for the International Conference on Computational Science (which, we've been informed is a "class A conference", according to international rankings). Feeling quite exhausted spent a good part of the afternoon resting, and then walked around the warf and foreshore area before attending the pre-conference drinks. The conference and my accomadation is at the Pullman International which is pretty swank (well above what I would settle for), and almost stylish. The view from the 11th floor isn't too bad either; Cairns is quite an interesting town geographically, existing between the Coral Sea Trinity Bay harbour and the Great Dividing Range and with a tropical climate and ecology. There seems to be a genuine effort on the part of the local government to provide some decent facilities as well, at least in the central district and foreshore region which I've explored.

As for the conference itself, I have some fairly mixed feelings so far. Luis Berrencourt provided a reasonably good presentation on the science of cities, although it was also - perhaps inadvertantly - an argument for land taxes. Warren Kaplan and Andrew Lonie both provided excellent overviews of developments in genomics, especially with the use of cloud computing. Whilst the science is grand, I have been increasingly wondering whether the economics of using cloud computing is a cost-effective way to conduct parallel processing. Two options to me seem available either (a) raise the skillset of research scientists to a usable level to use various job submission tools effectively or (b) provide a user interface that reduces the skillset needed to utilise the system. Increasingly, I am of the considered opinion that (a) is the better option. It is an issue which should be raised today after I present my paper (yes LJ/DW, you get a preview before the conference).

Had a very strange dream last night that Mac the cat had died due to accidental poisoning on the estate grounds. However, in my dream I recalled that caseopaya had shown me Mac through a Google hangout video call from last night. But then I was told, no that was just a dream and that the cat really was dead. This was a little disconcerting, and I woke up slightly unsure whether the cat was alive or not (shades of Schrodinger!). The only thing that acted as strong confirmation of the cat's state was that caseopaya would have been a lot more upset. Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.