Supercomputing Conference Day 4

After a good night's sleep in that deliciously cool hotel room Southern Man spent the morning learning about another set of tools for parallel programming called openMP and a bit about parallel debugging and profiling. Southern Man admits that the latter was a bit over his head but he tries to write code simple enough that it doesn't need profiling.

He slipped out during lunch break, as he usually does, to find geocaches on campus.

One was near this lovely pond.

A campus police officer stopped, curious as to why an "elderly gentleman" was wandering around in one-hundred-ten-degree weather in jacket and tie. Pay him no mind, officer; he's harmless. You know what they say about mad dogs and Southern Men...

Why, yes, they do call it the Duck Pond. Why do you ask?

Feeding the ducks.

In the afternoon we played with Conway's Game of Life which is a good problem to distribute across multiple cores. Southern Man has written that one before and mostly fooled around with Project Euler problems instead and got hung up on a number theory problem for much of the afternoon.

After dinner Southern Man strolled around a bit and geocached some more and then went back for an evening round-table discussion on various tips and tricks on communicating these rather difficult ideas to students.