The Microsoft/Intel HPC Party
Nov. 16th, 2005 09:45 amLast night I had a ticket to "the fastest party in town," the Microsoft/Intel High Performance Computing party an the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum at the Seattle Center. The big draw of the night was going to be Sheryl Crow, scheduled to do an hour-long set at ten.
Obviously, I was bored out of my skull. I mean, a free and open bar is a nice thing, but after one beer I was done. I'd make a terrible alcoholic: I'd forget to drink! I drank pop for the rest of the night and mostly enjoyed the SF Museum. At one point, I was taking notes and a man with a badge identifying himself as being from Oak Ridge National Laboratories struck up a conversation with me, wondering why anyone would take notes in a museum. I mentioned that I wrote SF but not proferossienaly, and he nodded and said, "Mm, hmm, mm, hmm," over and over, and then wandered away. I tried to out-trivia another fan as we watched the "space ships of science fiction" video go by and the only ship I didn't know was the Bebop from Cowboy Bebop. All the rest were obvious. I recognized the Nostromo from Alien; he didn't.
I finally sat and watched the whole documentary on the evolution of the electric guitar. That was fascinating.
But the crowd was dull, lots of glitzy sales types and little knots of geekery with whom I had very little in common, them being mostly high-performance supercomputing types, a science in which I haven't dabbled in nearly fifteen years, which is a freakin' eternity for that discipline. I saw very little to convince me that Microsoft's "High Performance Computing" platform is going to make any inroads. Their logo is pure "We are the world, there is no-one else" Microsoft marketing, as it reads "HPC goes mainstream." Hey, HPC has been around for a decade. MS is just panicking because HPC is one of the few places where Linux dominates, and it's precisely because HPC is so demanding and generally unique in its application.
I had listened to a lot of Iron Maiden on the drive up in the hopes of being inoculated against Sheryl Crow when I got there, and it mostly worked. Finding an old William's Defender console on the third floor of the SF Musuem helped a lot, although I learned both that my joints couldn't take as much of it as they could when I was fifteen, and that I can still score 150,000 without breaking much of a sweat. A million would take an hour-- maybe some other time. (I've often wondered if Eugene Jarvis, the programmer of Defender, knew a million would take almost exactly an hour. I think he once swore he didn't believe anyone could pass 100,000 ever.)
I left around midnight, having run into absolutely nobody I knew or with whom I felt comfortable. I have discovered that, if I get to bed more than an hour later, skipping the usual dose of melatonin but taking vitamin B-12 instead has a marvelous effect and I do not wake up as tired as I did when I religiously took the melatonin no matter what the hour.
Obviously, I was bored out of my skull. I mean, a free and open bar is a nice thing, but after one beer I was done. I'd make a terrible alcoholic: I'd forget to drink! I drank pop for the rest of the night and mostly enjoyed the SF Museum. At one point, I was taking notes and a man with a badge identifying himself as being from Oak Ridge National Laboratories struck up a conversation with me, wondering why anyone would take notes in a museum. I mentioned that I wrote SF but not proferossienaly, and he nodded and said, "Mm, hmm, mm, hmm," over and over, and then wandered away. I tried to out-trivia another fan as we watched the "space ships of science fiction" video go by and the only ship I didn't know was the Bebop from Cowboy Bebop. All the rest were obvious. I recognized the Nostromo from Alien; he didn't.
I finally sat and watched the whole documentary on the evolution of the electric guitar. That was fascinating.
But the crowd was dull, lots of glitzy sales types and little knots of geekery with whom I had very little in common, them being mostly high-performance supercomputing types, a science in which I haven't dabbled in nearly fifteen years, which is a freakin' eternity for that discipline. I saw very little to convince me that Microsoft's "High Performance Computing" platform is going to make any inroads. Their logo is pure "We are the world, there is no-one else" Microsoft marketing, as it reads "HPC goes mainstream." Hey, HPC has been around for a decade. MS is just panicking because HPC is one of the few places where Linux dominates, and it's precisely because HPC is so demanding and generally unique in its application.
I had listened to a lot of Iron Maiden on the drive up in the hopes of being inoculated against Sheryl Crow when I got there, and it mostly worked. Finding an old William's Defender console on the third floor of the SF Musuem helped a lot, although I learned both that my joints couldn't take as much of it as they could when I was fifteen, and that I can still score 150,000 without breaking much of a sweat. A million would take an hour-- maybe some other time. (I've often wondered if Eugene Jarvis, the programmer of Defender, knew a million would take almost exactly an hour. I think he once swore he didn't believe anyone could pass 100,000 ever.)
I left around midnight, having run into absolutely nobody I knew or with whom I felt comfortable. I have discovered that, if I get to bed more than an hour later, skipping the usual dose of melatonin but taking vitamin B-12 instead has a marvelous effect and I do not wake up as tired as I did when I religiously took the melatonin no matter what the hour.
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