Lev Lafayette's journal

The past few days I've been attending the Challenges in High Performance Computing conference. It's a fairly small affair, and very much at the pointy-end of math nerds interested in such a subject. I managed to arrive in time for the conference dinner which was at the held at the Pollen Cafe at the Australian Botanical Gardens, which included a guided tour beforehand. The tour was really quite enjoyable and the food and drink were magnificent. Especially noteworthy presentations included Ulrich Ruede, from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, on "Extreme-Scale Resilient Multigrid Solvers", Paul Leopardi, from the Bureau of Meteorology, on "Optimizing workflow scheduling and capacity management", and Lois Curfman McInnes, from Argonne National Laboratory, on "Community Software Ecosystems". My own presentation was Why Computers Lie at Alarming Speed and the unum Promise. Also, after the second day, found myself at a Canberra Python group. After the conference went down to the National Computing Infrastructure to give a second presentation, this time an ARDC tech-talk on The International HPC Certification Forum and AU-NZ, which is the third time I've given that presentation in a month. Maybe there's interest in it or something. The NCI people gave a presentation on their new system, Gadi, which will be the peak system for Australia. Also was pleased to catch up with taavi for lunch where we chatted primarily about bronze-age economics.

Whilst these talks were going on, Tiger Airlines sent me a message that my flight back to Melbourne had been canceled due to engineering issues. You don't want to fly a Tiger that has engineering issues so I made my way back to the hotel to check-in for another two nights - the Nesuto - which provides essentially a small apartment for the price of a hotel room. It was quite comical in a way, it was pouring rain, I was dripping wet, and conversing incredulously on the mobile with Tiger about the fact that the next flight was in two night's time. The hotel receptionist could barely contain her laughter. Tiger will be paying for the extra two nights, along with a free flight home, which I suppose is not unreasonable under the circumstances. Tomorrow morning I'll visit the Legislative Assembly, given it's literally across the road from the hotel, the_shadow298 has arranged to catch up for lunch, and in the evening Zoe B., has invited me to a restaurant games night. So in a short time, I appear to be making something of a weekend of it after all.