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tcpipArrived in Auckland on Monday for the IEEE eScience conference. Auckland is not my favourite part of New Zealand, but it does have some charms, not the least being the location for the edgy and danky series Bro'Town. Instead of presenting a paper at this conference I've given a "lightning talk" based on a poster co-written with colleague Bernd Wiebelt from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg with the exciting topic Spartan and NEMO: Two HPC-Cloud Hybrid Implementations. Actually it went pretty well and have engaged a few other people attempting similar projects in other parts of the world. The conference has had a few interesting streams, including various computational workflow techniques and use of GPUs for acceleration. I stepped outside my usual area of interest for a rather enjoyable stream on digital preservation of cultural artifacts. Tonight was the conference dinner held at the Fale Pasifika Complex at the University of Auckland. The guest speaker was Weta's Luca Francisco who previously worked at Pixar and was part of the Ratatouille team, and explained the magic of video effects.
Tomorrow as the conference ends I'll make my way south to visit the good folk at Nyriad and soak up a little bit of the New Zealand countryside on the way. Then it's back to Melbourne to dive into some rather annoying MPI and RDMA over Converged Ethernet issues on our GPGPU project. When one is building a machine that is of this power and using some of the latest technologies, there is always the concern that some component in the stack isn't going to quite fit. In addition, after hours I've been beavering away on several RPG-related projects, including writing reviews of Terror Australis, EPOCH, and the truly horrible task of editing RPG Review. I managed to get in contact with Tim Kask as well and reminded him of his offer to write the foreword of Papers & Paychecks. I do hope he comes the party in that regard, it would be delightfully appropriate.
Tomorrow as the conference ends I'll make my way south to visit the good folk at Nyriad and soak up a little bit of the New Zealand countryside on the way. Then it's back to Melbourne to dive into some rather annoying MPI and RDMA over Converged Ethernet issues on our GPGPU project. When one is building a machine that is of this power and using some of the latest technologies, there is always the concern that some component in the stack isn't going to quite fit. In addition, after hours I've been beavering away on several RPG-related projects, including writing reviews of Terror Australis, EPOCH, and the truly horrible task of editing RPG Review. I managed to get in contact with Tim Kask as well and reminded him of his offer to write the foreword of Papers & Paychecks. I do hope he comes the party in that regard, it would be delightfully appropriate.
