The weekend was RuneQuest Glorantha Con Down Under IV. It had roughly the same attendance as last year (around 50), but was a much longer conference, spread over two days. I was greatly assisted by Ninjadan who helped run around collecting the tote bags and printed journal for the last day. Anyway, everything went pretty much to plan. Jason Durall was the international guest of honour and delivered a particularly interesting talk on writing for Chaosium. I donned a dragon mask and pretended to be the Scholar Wyrm of Sartar, whilst elaborating on symbolicist meta-ontology. The multi-system scenario went well, the auctions were popular, and we had some great boardgames as well. Feedback has been very positive; so I guess it all worked out fine.
After packing everything up and taking it home, I made a mad rush to the Antique Bar in Elsternwick where friends and family of Dave Brooks were having a few farewell drinks for the recently and dearly departed. I caught up with his daughters who are now well and truly grown up, not quite how I remember them at all! After all, it has been more than twenty years. Also present were Jude S., and Sean U., a couple of good friends from the times I used to see Dave a lot. There was a great scrapbook of the Kanas City Killers, Dave's old Perth band from the eighties, with cut-outs from articles from the Party Fears 'zine, which would be of interest to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
reddragdiva. I am quite inspired, from seeing the list of bands that the Killers played with (And An A, Kryptonics, Greenhouse Effect etc) to do an "Eighties Perth Alternative" webpage or similar that could host some of these near-forgotten productions. Possibly material for a Rocknerd article as well.
Back into the workspace, much of yesterday was taken up with a lengthy multi-person presentation by Intel. They have been bitten rather badly in the past couple of years following the dumping of the Xeon Phi line and the gaping security and/or performance hole that is Spectre and Meltdown. Much of their presentation was about the performance improvements that Intel has for their version of Python (truly impressive, but please feed upstream), their version of MPI, their profiling and tuning tools, and a the new oneAPI project, which is meant to provide a run across multiple hardware models, which is particularly interesting for AI/DL/ML application development. We will see if the libraries are really sufficiently hardware-independent to the low-level hardware specific code. Certainly, Intel need something successful for others to regain confidence in their products.
After packing everything up and taking it home, I made a mad rush to the Antique Bar in Elsternwick where friends and family of Dave Brooks were having a few farewell drinks for the recently and dearly departed. I caught up with his daughters who are now well and truly grown up, not quite how I remember them at all! After all, it has been more than twenty years. Also present were Jude S., and Sean U., a couple of good friends from the times I used to see Dave a lot. There was a great scrapbook of the Kanas City Killers, Dave's old Perth band from the eighties, with cut-outs from articles from the Party Fears 'zine, which would be of interest to
reddragdiva. I am quite inspired, from seeing the list of bands that the Killers played with (And An A, Kryptonics, Greenhouse Effect etc) to do an "Eighties Perth Alternative" webpage or similar that could host some of these near-forgotten productions. Possibly material for a Rocknerd article as well.Back into the workspace, much of yesterday was taken up with a lengthy multi-person presentation by Intel. They have been bitten rather badly in the past couple of years following the dumping of the Xeon Phi line and the gaping security and/or performance hole that is Spectre and Meltdown. Much of their presentation was about the performance improvements that Intel has for their version of Python (truly impressive, but please feed upstream), their version of MPI, their profiling and tuning tools, and a the new oneAPI project, which is meant to provide a run across multiple hardware models, which is particularly interesting for AI/DL/ML application development. We will see if the libraries are really sufficiently hardware-independent to the low-level hardware specific code. Certainly, Intel need something successful for others to regain confidence in their products.
