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HPC Asia, RPG Update
Jan. 16th, 2022 09:58 amFor three days last week, I attended HPCAsia (remotely, of course) which, true to most conferences of this ilk, concentrated on the application of some of the world's most powerful computing systems (the world's number #1 in Tokyo) to the sort of mathematical and scientific problems that require it. It is pleasing that the ACM has published proceedings that will be free for the next two weeks. Due to the nature of my own role, I am particularly interested in new system and chip architectures, especially when people try some interesting heterogeneous combinations (e.g., FPGAs and GPUs for astrophysics). Appropriately, my work has tapped me on the shoulder to produce a short comparison in HPC systems between Intel and AMD which I'll do with some wry amusement - following the International Supercomputing Conference in 2018, I made suggestions of looking at this following the EU's lead; "And the turtle did indeed move". I also announced on Friday four HPC training workshops with a new one on "High Performance and Parallel Python on HPC", somewhat of a necessity as so many of the current generation use Python by default and the fact it's not exactly famous for performance.
Most of my evenings have been spent working on the upcoming issue of RPG Review and our AGM for the end of the month. In honour of Terry K Amthor, we're doing a special edition on ICE games and settings and I've been plodding my way composing an article to "fix" the magic system used in Middle-Earth Role-Playing for that setting. MERP was derived from Rolemaster, and Rolemaster was, by default, set in a highly visually magical setting of Amthor's Shadow World, whereas in Tolkien most magical expressions were somewhat more subtle and naturalistic. On another related matter I've been picking up just a few items to add to my RPG collection; when I conducted a sizeable sell-off two years ago to donate to Médecins Sans Frontières for their coronavirus efforts, I sold off some items that I probably should have kept as mementoes. Re-acquiring such items does look like it will somewhat more expensive than my notoriously generous pricing, but of course, I have the option to be more selective. All in good time, and this weekend I'm spending a short holiday at Phillip Island.
Most of my evenings have been spent working on the upcoming issue of RPG Review and our AGM for the end of the month. In honour of Terry K Amthor, we're doing a special edition on ICE games and settings and I've been plodding my way composing an article to "fix" the magic system used in Middle-Earth Role-Playing for that setting. MERP was derived from Rolemaster, and Rolemaster was, by default, set in a highly visually magical setting of Amthor's Shadow World, whereas in Tolkien most magical expressions were somewhat more subtle and naturalistic. On another related matter I've been picking up just a few items to add to my RPG collection; when I conducted a sizeable sell-off two years ago to donate to Médecins Sans Frontières for their coronavirus efforts, I sold off some items that I probably should have kept as mementoes. Re-acquiring such items does look like it will somewhat more expensive than my notoriously generous pricing, but of course, I have the option to be more selective. All in good time, and this weekend I'm spending a short holiday at Phillip Island.
