Conference

I am filled with geeky joy that I’ll be at Supercomputing in Austin this week. Reading through the program, I’m struck both by how far my field has come, and how little things have changed. There are sessions on reconfigurable computing, energy efficient supercomputing, yotta-scale storage, and so on. There are also the obligatory sessions on automatic parallelization and other unsolvable problems.

There is also the conference reception:

For entertainment, there will be Mariachi music and Flamenco and Salsa dancers, cowboy poetry, toe-tappin’ country music and line dancin’, the rhythms of Native American drums, and the shouts of brave SC buckaroos as they ride the mechanical bull. The menu will be just as diverse, with authentic foods served at many sites around the ranch. There will even be s’mores served up hot and gooey from a campfire, as well as hand-rolled SC08 brand “ceegars.”

I believe I speak for many of us attendees when I say: “Mechanical bull? Oh hell no.”