Lev Lafayette's journal

Second day of MC-ing Multicore World 2014 was of equally high quality as the first day. Highlight was an enthusiastic talk by Alex St. John, the person who co-invented DirectX and promoted gaming technologies in Microsoft in the 90s. At the end of his talk, on game technology and heterogenous HPC, I rattled off the list of computer games that had consumed a fair part of my life (Wizardry, Ultima, Nethack, Sword of Aragon, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Red Alert), but pointed out that most of such time was spent with pencil and paper games, such as Dungeons & Dragons. I concluded with a personal gift: "Zaxxon, the 7th level Elf, would like to give you a solidified code snippet that generates random numbers from 1 to 20", and handed him a d20. Graciously received, and with much amusement from the audience, he mentioned that he did head up the local D&D group in Alaska when he was younger. Of course he did, and I had deduced that in advance.

The last two days has been the second, and more specialised, conference, Computing for the Square Kilometre Array, which will the largest radio telescope project in history with an impressive international consortium. The installation is by no means trivial; it is expected to generated ten times the current global Internet traffic, especially when these have their raw collection in hot, isolated desert areas. The stitching together of the results from numerous relatively small radio dishes with correlators isn't easy either. In terms of presentation quality, Ewan Barr from Swinburne University, discussing "Hunting Pulsars and Fast Transients" provided material that was accessible and exciting. All the technical talks however came with excellent and challenging content. This really can be world-changing material, but I must confess my poor brain at times was struggling to keep up.