SEMiSLUG Notes
13 July 2006
Question & Answer Sessions
- Free schwag t-shirts (XL) anyone?
- John's got some.
- Why does Baltimore suck?
- You really need to ask MJO about this. Buy him a drink and wind him up.
- Where is Troy? (Jobs?)
- No idea. Not even sure if he's looking for a job this month.
- What is the airspeed of an an Arbor Google in flight?
- Huge tax rebate ... lots of sales jobs ... looking for
200,000 sq.ft. ... could be interesting.
- Any hints for debugging USB on Windows?
- Uh ... assume they have the wrong drivers or there's a driver
conflict. Windows is generally okay with this sort of thing.
- Is PGP/GPG worth it?
- Eh ... nah. Many people that used to, solely on general principles,
just don't bother any more.
- Anyone have any harassing technical questions?
- "Why would you ever want to do that!?"
-
Presentation
"The changing face of High Performance Computing"
with Joe Landman, Founder and CEO, Scalable Informationcs LLC
( http:/www.scalableinformatics.com/ )
Joe's bio
BS, MS in physics, Ph.D. in Computational Physics
~6 years working for SGI after graduate school
[...etc...]
There $9.1B (and growing) in HPC. Wow.
There's a lot of Linux clusters in this.
Folks want "supercomputer performance without paying supercomputer prices."
Venture capitalists should LOVE this sort of rapidly growing market ... but they're
more interested in esoteric things, apparently.
Why compute? Because we can . . .
+ Test models
+ Make predictions
+ Extend science
+ Aside from that, it's addictive ... err ... fun.
Field Programmable Gate Arrays -- watch for these.
[... as usual, much interesting stuff that was
engrossing enough that note-taking stopped ...]
Rumor & Innuendo (No names, please)
SGI may survive another month. (You heard it here first!)