Supercomputing Conference Day 3

The opening plenary session was right here in the Red Lion, which made for a lazy morning and an opportunity to hit another geocache...

...which was just outside this coffee shop and named in honor of a free local newspaper. Photo by another kind customer.

And with the LittleFe buildout behind us, this afternoon Southern Man went to a session on BCCD (the bootable-cluster software which manages the computer) and another on making effective use of our GP/GPU chips.

During that session a fellow SC11 geocacher made contact through email fishing for hints on that Gum Wall cache and we arranged to meet and do a little caching before the evening festivities. We headed out to the Seattle waterfront, picked up the Gum Wall, then did a few more out on the docks (in an unspoken competition between his GPS and Southern Man's iPad), then swung back by the aforementioned Seattle Weekly cache that he'd also tried for earlier and couldn't find. So Southern Man ended up looking pretty good tonight; usually he's the one looking for hints.

At a couple of caches with juc_cacher. Photos taken from his camera.

The main event tonight was the much-anticipated opening of the exhibitor hall. We were warned to pack light and leave plenty of room in our luggage for the immense mountain of swag that will be thrust upon us and this turned out to be prudent advice. Southern Man collected a fair number of bags and t-shirts and pens and such and generally had a great time. But by some tragic oversight Southern Man neglected to pull his two drink tickets out of the bundle of paperwork we were issued at registration but he is a resourceful fellow and managed to score not the designated two but three "free" adult beverages at the opening. Southern Man takes a perverse amount of pride in this accomplishment.

And then the other main event was the Beowulf Bash at the Seattle Aquarium with a live band and food and more drinks!

Yes, that poster is in with the fishes. Those Beowulf people are pretty crazy.

So Southern Man ate and drank and chatted and explored the aquarium and generally had a grand time until alcohol and exhaustion finally overcame him and he limped back home for a much-needed night's sleep.

And the next day as he was editing this post Southern Man googled for more info on the Bash and got this result...

That's right - five minutes after typing "Beowulf party" into the blog he's the fourth hit on Google. Epic Win!