Just My Imagination

Thanks for the advice. I had an interesting week. I talked to the UPC people and Kathy Yelick, who confirmed that I was on the right track with the code I'm working on (as in, there really isn't a very good way of dealing with runtime-determined block distribution).

There was a fantastic keynote speaker (Neil Gershenfeld from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms) who talked generally about the mapping between information and its physical representation and specifically about some neat international Fab Lab projects. His "Internet 0" protocol is a fun concept: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/labs/lyngen/projects/iz/index.html . I think MIT is my dream grad school, given the percentage of people and projects I think are awesome that turn out to come from there...

I met a lady who does music visualization work at UNM and got a pamphlet for you on this project (networked long-distance multimedia performance): http://jackox.net/pages/gridjampages/Gridjam1.html (I was going to mail it, but the link turned out to contain the same information). They are doing some kind of computer music event at SC08, I couldn't find a link to it anywhere but I'll tell you if I hear anything else about it, could be interesting.

It wasn't as "fun" a trip as I imagined but I feel like I have a much better idea of what kind of people and jobs are in the industry, in a way that would have been difficult to experience without being there. There were more women in positions of leadership than I expected, which was encouraging. It was also nice to see people sharing information and research with each other so that efforts didn't get duplicated: for example, the presentation on cortical modeling referenced current efforts like the Blue Brain project at the EPFL, and the people writing parallel debugger plugins to Eclipse brought in the people creating trace tools for the same parallel languages.

Blue Man Group played for the closing event/party, it was pretty cool. They played covers of rock hits on instruments made of PVC pipe and sprayed paint all over the place.

I think that's about it. We didn't spend much time in Reno itself due to needing to run back and forth from the conference center and the downtown area being a little sketchy. I got a glowing plastic ice cube and a fluffy orange cube that says "Yatta Yatta!" when you throw it at walls. And...I'm pretty happy to be back. :)