Lev Lafayette's journal

For the past six days or so I've been in Wellington for Multicore World which, as usual, is a small but very high-quality pointy-end-of-the-technology conference. Actually, it's almost a truism of technology conferences - the smaller the conference and the higher the proportion of international guests, the higher the quality. There were many good presentations, but one which really caught my attention was "Preparing for Extreme Heterogeneity in High Performance Computing" by Jeffrey Vetter, of Oak Ridge National Laboratories and Scaling! by Richard O'Keefe. My own presentation was Complex Problems Actually Have Complex Solutions which argued against some unfortunate management trends (and interestingly correlated with the emergent theme of heterogeneity) with plenty of New Zealand related references.

As would be quite well-known, February 18 was Bramble Cay Melomys Day, which was quite a success. The Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick gave a speech in parliament, several memorial events were held around the country (as can be seen on the Facebook group), the petition for a national memorial and museum for extinct and endangered animals is up and running, and I stood in the morning drizzle in Wellington to initiate proceedings for Australia (because I enjoy starting Australian things in New Zealand). This is, of course, not the end of events but rather the beginning,

Convention organiser Nicolás Erdödy has once again delivered a superb event at a great location and with amazing catering. I think I'll live on dry bread and water for a few days after this. After each day of the conference, I made by back to the delightfully scarred deco beauty that is Hotel Waterloo, which is brilliantly good-value for those who like this sort of style, and have worked on my MSc dissertation which has the title, Is the Future of Business Software Proprietary or Free and Open-Source?. Having completed the trend data collection and conducted interviews my conclusion is heading to the proposition that this is a race condition between engineering requirements and a natural marginal cost of reproduction versus the use of the cloud to achieve subscription-based vendor lock-in. On client-servers, I think the latter is winning. Anyway, all this said it means I haven't had the opportunity to really engage in the Wellington I know and love. No visits to the museums, or galleries, or even the observatory. The best I have managed is a catch-up lunch with mr_orgue, which was frankly great, as we hadn't seen each other for a couple of years. Anyway, following a rather awful sleep (or lack thereof), I'm about to board the big silver bird and cross The Ditch back to Australia.

Earlier this week I found out via Facebook that two friends, Michael H., and Mark R., from different social circles, had died. It struck me, in part because I had been at the conference all day, and was suddenly confronted with this news with all its immediacy. I cannot say I was particularly close to either but both were the sort of people whose company I enjoyed; great minds, big hearts, and a well-tuned sense of the absurd. What struck me was the realisation that in pre-social media times, weeks if not months or even years could have passed before I would have received this news, and how it cuts in the other direction as well. Connectivity is often stronger, more organic (to use Durkheim's classic dichotomy), and especially lasting. Once upon a time you could meet someone, form a friendship, lose contact, and in ten years even their name would be forgotten. Now we have the extension of our mind, recorded in digital, replicated on servers worldwide, "Google never forgets", and our digital footprints in the sand are not washed away, but rather become a source for recollections by ourselves and others.

Meanwhile, I am still in Wellington. Multicore World has finished, with the last day of formal proceedings followed by a round-table workshop (I stayed for half of the latter, wanting to see a bit of the city during business hours). From the last day's talks I was particularly impressed with Jeffrey Vetter from Oakridge, talking about their future supercomputers and heterogeneous memory architectures, on which he has a very good paper. With retirement impending Mark Seager of Intel gave a heartfelt presentation on being part of a 34-year journey, which he points out included witnessing a 100Bx computational performance improvement in that time.

My journeys on the half-day I had free included a visit to the NZ Labour Party to rejoin (that makes four social-democratic and democratic socialist parties I am a member of in AU, NZ, DE, and FR), followed by a trip to the Wellington City Museum, which is a truly superb little institution. My favourite of the many stories the place tells is the short documentary of the Tragedy of the Wahine, overlayed with the hauntingly beautiful sounds of Adagio in G Minor. I have said in the past that this is possibly the most powerful short documentary I have ever seen, and I still hold to that - and that was before I found out that I had been on the said boat several weeks prior to its sinking, in utero.

Technically, I am officially on holiday from now until and the coming week. I do suspect that I am going to continue at least some work as that is my nature; I have software installations to complete and impending courses to teach. Nevertheless, I also have my own studies to pay attention to. This morning I handed in a massive mid-term assignment for my MSc, and next week I'm off to Dunedin to attend the opening classes for my MHed. Which means whatever spare time does fall my way I will be making the most of.

The weekend witnessed a trip out to the Knox festival, primarily to join a group of friends to see Polly Samuel who is counting down what is almost certainly the last weeks of her life. We took a long our copy of the bestselling Nobody Nowhere which we found at a book sale on the other end of the country. It is of course, an extremely honest and insightful autobiography, and Polly no doubt will have some great pride in the contribution she has made to the world.

The following day went to see Sixteen Legs at The Astor, introduced by patron Neil Gaiman and with said writer incorporating a dark fantasy story into this feature-length nature documentary on the Tasmanian Cave Spider. It was all fairly good, but to be honest it didn't justify a feature-length film and Neil Gaiman's "dark fantasy" wasn't nearly as strange and evocative as a lot fo his other works. I have the sneaking suspicion that the main reason the huge numbers of people turned up in the first place was to see him.

That day was also a meeting of The Philosophy Forum where I gave a presentation on The Philosophy of Quantum Physics, a rather conceptually difficult topic, often counter-intuitive, and often subject to speculations by people who clearly know nothing of the subject at all. Fortunately the well-attended meeting were people of sound and rational minds and there were was very good discussion on matters of quantum entanglement in particular.

It was not the only presentation of the past few days however; last night gave a talk at Linux Users of Victoria, giving a summary of Multicore World 2017, along with making some suggestions for improvement. The meeting also had two short talks, one by Russell Coker on Quilt, a patch management system, and Rodney Brown, on RISC V, a free and open source RISC architecture.

I've written a few paragraphs on Multicore World, essentially giving an overview of what was a small, specialist, but high quality conference. The most disappointing aspect was, due to being quite new to my current job that I simply couldn't take the necessary leave to travel around the country and catch up with NZ-located friends as I am want to do. Whilst the conference location, right on Wellington harbour, was great, I simply had only sufficient time to travel to and from the hotel room to the venue (the conference also tended to run from 0800 to 2000 hours each day). One significant positive to the conference was catching up with John Gustafson who took the time to write a frankly overwhelming praise singer's foreward to my book on Sequential and Parallel Programming with C and Fortran (actually, there's some good history and humour there, but the conclusion just floored me).

On the return trip squeezed in two in-flight movies, The Martian and The Peanuts Movie. The former was a little too much on heroic side and included one major scientific error (the dust storm), but was otherwise an exciting feel-good film. The latter was full of nostalgic charm with all the favourite characters and situations. Apropos entertainments, on my return to Melbourne have enjoyed two games (one as player and one as GM) of Eclipse Phase. In the second game the story arc has moved from being introduced to firewall in the main belt, acquiring some alien technology, and making their way to the Jovian orbit. An issue concerning VR time dilation in the game has also been resolved. This, and a number of rule elaborations and clarifications will be included in the Eclipse Phase Companion which I'll put in the RPG Review github in the next day or so.

Today I managed to meet up with certifiedwaif whom I've know for some twenty years online but never had a face-to-face encounter (despite the fact we're relatively nearby on the global scale of things. We had lunch with members of the team, chatted about various programming and numerical calculation issues (his PhD and work interests) and generally had a pleasant time. With NinjaDan discussed how Internet culture can be very much like the belles-lettres of yesteryear, but without the latency (which allows for higher levels of literary intimacy). Internet culture does mean that it is not uncommon to have friends and associates that one doesn't meet face-to-face for several years, and yet still share close and continuing communication. With the possible exception of short-wave radio aficionados, who are in many way the culture's precursors, this is a significant change to the way we live.

Brought almost everything related to the cluster back online this week, hitting 90% utilisation by Friday, with reviving a downed node saved for other's use. Also this week have dropped into ResBaz. There was a couple of hundred people involved, so it's been quite a show, and ran into Yaokang W., who is interested in the fascinating field of using the Natural Language Tookit in case law. In a couple of weeks I'll be travelling to Wellington to present and MC at Multicore World. My paper has puns in the title; A Laconic HPC with an Orgone Accumulator.

The Isocracy Network has a new article by William Hathaway on a Long Term Strategy for the Left, but also a timely new national policy for asylum seekers developed by Damien Kingsbury, myself, and other troublemakers. 'Timely' is used in the disturbing context of the High Court deciding that the children of asylum seekers born in Australia could still be sent to offshore detention. Attended the large (and mainly unreported) snap protest at the State Library for those of us still opposed to the torture of babies (has it really come to this?).

Three other events attended this week; GURPS Middle Earth and Laundry Files games on last Sunday and Thursday respectively, the latter quite notable for using characters and setting from The Man Who Would Be King. Went to Robina C's et. als, exhibition on Friday at The Food Court; an interesting space and indicitive of an area that has been over-developed - nows the artists are moving in.

Currently attending MulticoreWorld 2014, a small but important annual international conference held in New Zealand which I have contributed as MC since the first event three year ago. The conference deals with the inevitable change and issues relating to multicore computing, ranging from the massive HPC systems to embedded systems, and the related subject of parallel programming. Although the conference inevitably has less than 75 people in attendance, the quality of speakers and subject matter is superb.

The keynote was delivered by John Gustafson, a person whom I have a great deal of respect for. especially for the development of the earliest clusters and his simple but clever overcoming of Amdahl's Law on the limitations from parallelisation of code. His presentation did not disappoint; in noting the power costs of HPC systems he associated this with memory overhead, and then went on to develop a new numerical notation system free from the typical computational errors (rounding, underflow, overflow etc) (a development from a presentation last year's to the IEEE). Other speakers of course presented well with interesting topics, but nothing surpassed the keynote in terms of revelation on the first day.

As the title indicates I am not a great fan of the city of the conference location; Auckland. I can understand that it a financial and business centre for New Zealand, and indeed the south Pacific. This is my fourth visit here, but it still strikes me as a relatively brash, sprawling, and souless place. I am staying in the north shore suburb of Northcote which prides itself in being "the cultural capital of Auckland", by which they presumably mean in terms of having the most ethnically diverse population. It is hard to describe the rotting couch on the verge, the abandoned shopping trolley in the local park, and the multitude of ageing muscle cars as being high culture.