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[Wherein we review an academic conference in the High/Low/Crush/Goal/Bane format used for reviewing juggling conventions on rec.juggling.]
High: My old Codeplay colleague Ally Donaldson's FAT-GPU workshop. He was talking about his GPUVerify system, which takes CUDA or OpenCL programs and either proves them free of data races and synchronisation-barrier conflicts, or finds a potential bug. It's based on an SMT solver; I think there's a lot of scope to apply constraint solvers to problems in compilation and embedded system design, and I'd like to learn more about them.
Also, getting to see the hotel's giant fishtank being cleaned, by scuba divers.
Low: My personal low point was telling a colleague about some of the problems my depression has been causing me, and having him laugh in my face - he'd been drinking, and thought I was exaggerating for comic effect. He immediately apologised when I told him that this wasn't the case, but still, not fun. The academic low point was the "current challenges in supercomputing" tutorial, which turned out to be a thinly-disguised sales pitch for the sponsor's FPGA cards. That tends not to happen at maths conferences...
Crush: am I allowed to have a crush on software? Because the benchmarking and visualisation infrastructure surrounding the Sniper x86 simulator looks so freaking cool. If I can throw away the mess of Makefiles, autoconf and R that serves the same role in our lab I will be very, very happy.
Goal: Go climbing on the Humboldthain Flakturm (fail - it turns out that Central Europe is quite cold in January, and nobody else fancied climbing on concrete at -7C). Get my various Coursera homeworks and bureaucratic form-filling done (fail - damn you, tasty German beer and hyperbolic discounting!). Meet up with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
maradydd, who was also in town (fail - comms and scheduling issues conspired against us. Next time, hopefully). See some interesting talks, and improve my general knowledge of the field (success!).
Bane: I was sharing a room with my Greek colleague Chris, who had a paper deadline on the Wednesday. This meant he was often up all night, and went to bed as I was getting up, so every trip into the room to get something was complicated by the presence of a sleeping person. He also kept turning the heating up until it was too hot for me to sleep. Dually, of course, he had to share his room with a crazy Brit who kept getting up as he was going to bed and opening the window to let freezing air in...
High: My old Codeplay colleague Ally Donaldson's FAT-GPU workshop. He was talking about his GPUVerify system, which takes CUDA or OpenCL programs and either proves them free of data races and synchronisation-barrier conflicts, or finds a potential bug. It's based on an SMT solver; I think there's a lot of scope to apply constraint solvers to problems in compilation and embedded system design, and I'd like to learn more about them.
Also, getting to see the hotel's giant fishtank being cleaned, by scuba divers.
Low: My personal low point was telling a colleague about some of the problems my depression has been causing me, and having him laugh in my face - he'd been drinking, and thought I was exaggerating for comic effect. He immediately apologised when I told him that this wasn't the case, but still, not fun. The academic low point was the "current challenges in supercomputing" tutorial, which turned out to be a thinly-disguised sales pitch for the sponsor's FPGA cards. That tends not to happen at maths conferences...
Crush: am I allowed to have a crush on software? Because the benchmarking and visualisation infrastructure surrounding the Sniper x86 simulator looks so freaking cool. If I can throw away the mess of Makefiles, autoconf and R that serves the same role in our lab I will be very, very happy.
Goal: Go climbing on the Humboldthain Flakturm (fail - it turns out that Central Europe is quite cold in January, and nobody else fancied climbing on concrete at -7C). Get my various Coursera homeworks and bureaucratic form-filling done (fail - damn you, tasty German beer and hyperbolic discounting!). Meet up with
maradydd, who was also in town (fail - comms and scheduling issues conspired against us. Next time, hopefully). See some interesting talks, and improve my general knowledge of the field (success!).Bane: I was sharing a room with my Greek colleague Chris, who had a paper deadline on the Wednesday. This meant he was often up all night, and went to bed as I was getting up, so every trip into the room to get something was complicated by the presence of a sleeping person. He also kept turning the heating up until it was too hot for me to sleep. Dually, of course, he had to share his room with a crazy Brit who kept getting up as he was going to bed and opening the window to let freezing air in...
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