Supercomputing Conference, Atlanta

Every year, thousands of tech giants, computer nerds, and NERSC staff alike flock to the conference on Supercomputing. Normally, from NERSC there's such high demand to attend that many staff are denied travel assistance. Maybe since it was my first time, I got a free pass. Several of my colleagues went the year prior and only had good things to say, so I wanted to know what it was like for myself, and maybe learn a thing or two along the way.

Sun, Nov 17, 2024

This morning, I went to SFO airport a bit late. Luckily, going through secuirty was very fast. Once again, it was slower to go through the pre-check line instead of the general one. I still went through the pre-check line anyway because I hate taking my shoes off in any dirty old airport. (To be fair, the SFO airport is generally pretty clean.) I got to the gate as people were lining up to board and I met Wenbin, a postdoc at NERSC, who sits by me at work and we frequently chat. We boarded the same plane, but sat apart from each other. It was an extremely full flight, and Wenbin and I were forced to check our bags before boarding. That was frustrating, because I knew we'd need to wait at baggage claim after disembarking the plane.

The flight was very smooth and I had a window seat! I had to get up once to use the bathroom, and I felt really bad about waking up the woman sitting next to me. I noticed a few other NERSC-ites on the plane, but they didn't see me. For the rest of the flight, I listened to Lumineers and Beach House, got some more work done (working on a cool floor plan graphic for our mechanical room), and started reading a new book. (Yes, I finished Blink, my third book this year!)

Wenbin and I walked for what felt like a mile and waited for what felt like an hour at baggage claim. Luckily, our bags were some of the first on the carousel, and he called an Uber for both of us. I'd heard the memes that "Atlanta was like a giant parking lot" (since traffic moves so slowly) so I expected a long ride, but we arrived at our hotels within 20 minutes from the airport. Not bad. The hotel was really nice and had a great view of the city skyline and the Georgia Aquarium, right across the street. I want to make sure I see that before I leave on Thursday.

I had plans to meet with Henderson, one of my friends from UC Davis tonight. He came to pick me up at my hotel and we went to an Asian fusion place called Noodoh. We both got noodles with beef and the meal was really good! Our waitress seemed a bit confused though, but she told us it was her first day on the job.

After dinner, Henderson drove us to the Atlanta Botanical Garden where it was all lit up as a Christmas light show. It was very well designed with a lot of different things lit up, like trees, statues, and hanging lights that followed the tune of the music that was playing. There was a mini train set running through the gardens, and we got to enter a rainforest greenhouse. They also were selling smores, hot cocoa, and other treats, but we didn't get anything. It was definitely a cash cow, with $10 parking and $40 entry fee per person, but I would say it was worth it to do once. It really was pretty, and the gardens were so huge that we spent well over an hour there.

Mon, Nov 18, 2024

I woke up at what was around 3:30 AM in California time, super tired of course. I went down to the hotel lobby for a quick breakfast, which was all right. I had some dry scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, some fruit, and doughnut holes. After that, I went back up to my room to finish getting ready, and decided to take the stairs down. I walked all the way down from the eighth to the first floor, but the stairs exited at some loading bay/patio type thing with dumpsters, and no way out in sight. It was really weird, so I ended up walking back up the stairs a few floors to the garage and just walked out that way instead. I guess I'll take the elevator to the lobby from now on.

I met Wenbin and we walked over to the Georgia World Congress Center together. It was a fairly short walk to get to the grounds, but there were so many buildings (or rather, just one massive building.) It took us a while, but we finally figured out how to actually enter the building. It was eerily quiet and empty inside. After another 5-10 minute walk inside this maze of a building, we got to the reception area and got our badges. We split off from there and I went to the Early Career Workshop.

Although there were some parts that really stressed me out, like some icebreaker games, the Early Career Workshop turned out to be very informative and helpful. I felt a bit like I was back in a classroom, it was an all-day event, starting around 8:30 AM and going until 5:00 PM. We had some group activities, a bingo sheet, practiced writing proposals and reports, had a group session on project planning, and ended with a career paths panel. Interestingly, most of the panelists worked in the Department of Energy, although there were a couple that worked in "industry." I think that was the most informative part of the workshop, and the main takeaway was that connections are extremely important in getting a job interview in the modern days of thousands of applicants.

In all, it was a pretty good session, even with the forced icebreakers, plus they served free lunch (tacos) and snacks! The snacks were mostly sweet treats, but I forced myself to eat an apple too. You know, to keep the doctor away. I ended the day by adding a bunch of other early career-ists on LinkedIn, and grabbed some SC stickers. I went straight back to the hotel after that because I was so tired, but my rest was short-lived.

Soon enough, I headed back out to the convention center to go to the Expo - basically a reverse job fair. Without planning it, I met up with Wenbin and some of the other NERSC postdocs on the walk over, despite coming from totally different locations. The exhibit hall was packed, maybe slightly less so than ASHRAE, but still very crowded nonetheless. This was definitely more of a party scene however, where many booths were serving food and beverages. I had some empanadas, a couple drinks, and I got to try out a VR headset. I was seeing DNA and cells close up. That was pretty cool. I worked on getting some of my "passport" stamps. If you go to certain booths, they will stamp your sheet, and once you have collected all the stamps, you are eligible to win prizes. Throughout our time in the exhibit hall, I met up with Norm and 2 other colleagues and we picked up a ton of free stuff like T-shirts, canvas bags, and other various items. I have no idea how I'll bring it all home.

Tue, Nov 19, 2024

The first item on my schedule wasn't until around 10 AM, so I got to sleep in a bit today. I almost got a full 8 hours! The breakfast was the same as yesterday, so I guess that means they always serve the same things. I will take a bland but free breakfast any day over a paid or nonexistent breakfast.

Norm and I walked over to the Georgia World Congress Center together but split up after we arrived. I went to a talk on carbon-efficient architectures, which I thought would have to do with carbon footprint, as in the name, or some kind of energy use. But nope! It was a super deep-dive into different kinds of matrix algorithms, that looked nothing like we learned in school. I left that talk a bit early to go to another one I found interesting on compiler analysis and code generation. I understood about 0% of that discussion. It was not about writing a script to write code, no no no, it was about "stencils" and communication using "colors", point index patterns, and way more complex things. These kinds of talks really make me wonder what these scientists are actually using our machines for?

I was originally planning to skip lunch, but I bumped into some of my NERSC colleagues and we all head over to Max's Coal Oven Pizzeria. Turns out, it's the only coal-fired pizza oven in the entire state of Georgia. I'm not sure I believe that, but the margarita pizza I ordered sure was good.

I had planned 3 more talks for the afternoon, which were all on the topic of liquid cooling. After heading back to the convention hall, the first one I went to was done by Strategic Thermal Labs on evaporative cooling. The main takeaways for that talk was that water is an extremely abundant resource, but potable water is scarce. Treated waste water provides the highest coefficient of performance, ahead of desalinated ocean water. Dry coolers and chillers are the least performant, although are required in certain scenarios.

The second talk I went to was on immersion cooling by Penguin Computing. I didn't learn anything entirely new, but it was still a good talk and refresher on immersion cooling, which is compute components completely submerged in a dielectric oil. One interesting point I learned though is that although it's a huge pain to service components that are submerged in liquid, they will need to be serviced less frequently since the more distributed cooling makes them less failure-prone. I wonder if it also helps with lubricating mechanical parts like hard drive disks.

I met up again with Norm for the final talk of the day, which was done by a panel of different speakers, including David from ORNL. This discussion was more focused on CDUs (coolant distribution units) and their respective controls. One speaker revealed an open standard for CDU control called PowerAPI. Unfortunately, it can't be used for extremely sensitive and top secret compute machines, since it could pose an additional security risk.

Now it's party time. After the talk, I met up with Wenbin and some others from NERSC. They walked over to an NVidia party, but Norm and I wanted to go back to the hotel to drop off our things first. We decided to skip the NVidia party and go straight to another one hosted by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE). This was at the World of Coca-Cola, and the entire museum was open! There was free food and drinks, and also a live band playing 80s hits, but they played way too loud! That was also the first time I ate grits. Not impressed with the fine southern cuisine! I walked through the whole museum, and there was an entire floor filled with fountain drink machines - but no bathrooms! I got to dry different sodas (mostly juices, since I don't like soda) from all around the world, including drinks that haven't yet been released. There was an apple and honey (I think) drink from Korea which I really liked and kept going back for more. I also ended up getting a bit of Christmas shopping done at the museum gift shop. I avoided it for so long, but in the end I got myself a mixed drink, recommended by Wenbin. It was with orange juice, grenadine, and lime, and it was really tasty, but I didn't get the name of it. It was starting to get late, and I really wanted to get at least 7ish hours of sleep so I left around 10:30 PM to walk back to my hotel. It was still packed in there like sardines when I left.

Wed, Nov 20, 2024

Last night, one of my colleagues sent out a general invitation to do a group morning run. I was trying to think up excuses not to go, which meant I really needed to go. Before even eating breakfast, I left the hotel to meet the 5 others for a run. It was super muggy outside, probably due to the rain from the night before. I had to jog a whole mile to get to their hotel first, and then we did a 3-mile run together, and of course there was the mile jog back. So in total, I ran 5 miles, and got back to my hotel just in time as breakfast was closing up. I quickly grabbed some bland eggs and potatoes, and saved an apple for later. Norm was there so we ate together.

After that, I showered, got ready, and went to a sustainability talk around 11 AM. We learned about totally enclosed compute racks that support both air and liquid cooling, which leaves room for growth. (Later on, I got to see one in real life on the expo floor.) The next talk I attended was done by a colleague from NERSC about Operational Data Analytics. I liked this talk since it was more interactive. They used a Kahoot-style presentation called Mentimeter where you could use your phone or device to answer questions. After that, I took a short break to have a snack and then returned to 3 back-to-back talks. The first two were done by HPC cooling infrastructure vendors, and the third talk was on parallel processing by a researcher at the US DoD. Going to all these talks makes me realize how frustrating it is when people sit on the ends of the row of seats, making it so that you need to awkwardly crawl over them.

I took a short break back at the hotel before heading out to the afterparties. I first went to the Dell customer appreciation event at the College Football Hall of Fame. It was really crowded in there again, even though we needed to preregister for this event. The food served there was pretty good, though. Some colleages and I explored the museum and tried to activate some of the games they had there, but they didn't work without a special RFID ticket which we didn't have. After a bit, 3 of us split off from the group to go to Wekafest, at a venue called Tabernacle. More food was served there, and they had live music - Jimmy Eat World! I really only know the one song (you know which one) but the performance was still really awesome. They gave us free glowsticks and drinks, and there was an cool fog and light show along with the music. I left after the performance, but most people stayed there, probably to score some more free stuff. I was just so tired and went back to the hotel for the night. There was a bowl of chocolates at the front desk, so I grabbed a handful on the way to my room.

Thu, Nov 21, 2024

This was my last day in Atlanta and there weren't many talks useful for me today, so I decided to take it easy and recharge my social batteries. I got to sleep in a bit but missed breakfast. I jam-packed all my loot and checked out, but left my bag at the front desk so I could explore town a bit before flying home.

The first thing I wanted to do was finally check out the Georgia Aquarium, which has been staring at me from across the street since I arrived. I actually was able to purchase a ticket right at the hotel front desk. That was great because I even got a 10% off discount, but it still ended up being $45 anyway! I walked over to the aquarium and was greeted with a swarm of glowing jellyfish. It was a huge aquarium and they had many exhibits, mostly geared towards children, but it was still a great experience. Unfortunately there were a couple field trips that day so it was pretty loud in there. I got to see 3 albino alligators, and 2 whale sharks, which really surprised me! The only time I ever thought I would see those was in Kaiyukan, in Osaka, but here they are. I also watched a dolphin show which was Christmas themed. It was really cool, and I sat far back enough as to not get splashed.

After that, I left the aquarium to get some steps in. I was surprised how close I was to Georgia Tech so I figured I'd go take a look around. The school was great, all the buildings were brick masonry and there were several buses for the students. There were game-day rallies going on while I was there, and several of the student housing were decorated for Christmas. I also walked along the Path Parkway for a bit before returning to the hotel. Atlanta is one place I would never jaywalk - these cars stop for no one! Even when it is your turn to cross the street...

I got back to the hotel to pick up my bag and grab some fruit that was left out from breakfast, and started walking over to the MARTA station, which is like BART, but for Atlanta. On the way I decided to have a late lunch/early dinner since I hadn't eaten anything of substance yet. I stopped by a fried chicken place called Rock's to see if the legends were true about southern fried chicken. They were. The breading was really crispy, and it was made with a very juicy chicken breast. The fries were also really meaty. The only downside is that I was bothered a bit by a homeless person who didn't want to leave me alone to eat.

Finally, I got to the MARTA station, and after a little bit of trouble figuring out how to buy a Breeze card from the machines, I was able to hop on the train just in time. It wasn't the most comfortable ride, but there were no delays at all which I think is way more important. BART, take note. In all, it only cost me $4.50 to ride from Peachtree Center to the Atlanta Airport. Again, BART, take note.

I arrived at the airport and it took a fair amount of time to get through security. Not more than 15 minutes, but still a lot more than SFO. I sat down by my gate about an hour before boarding. I promised myself to get in line super early so I wouldn't get stuck checking my bag again. After going on my phone for a bit and stretching my legs, I got in line, right behind NERSC's Scientific Engagement department head! So we chat for a bit before boarding, but we kept getting delayed longer and longer... Finally, after 45 minutes past our initial boarding time, they started letting people on the plane. I was in boarding group 2, and early in the line. Wouldn't you believe it, everyone in boarding group 2 had to check their bags. Everyone. So much for getting in line early. I was pretty upset since our flight, which was already scheduled late, was delayed, and now I have to wait in baggage claim after getting off?

It was an extremely full flight, but as a small redemption, there was one empty seat in my row of 3. The guy sitting next to me moved over to the aisle seat so we had some space in between, where we each put our carry-on bags. He was nice, and very chatty. Also works in data centers, but didn't attend SC. The flight was relatively smooth until the very end, unfortunately I didn't get any sleep but I was able to recline a bit more than usual and close my eyes which was nice. After the rough landing I went to baggage claim, and as another small redemption, my bag dropped within the first few minutes. I went over to the sky train, to long-term parking, and drove home in the rain.