so a few hours ago i got in to phoenix -- i'm here for the supercomputing conference, to make sure that our demo hardware doesn't suffer a debilitating kernel crash. also to attend some technical talks. oh, plus to relax, after having taken the computer science GRE last saturday and the general GRE on wednesday. i'm finally feeling that test-preparation stress lifted. aahhh.
so far all i've seen of phoenix has been the airport and the highways leading to my lovely hotel, where i have a nicely-appointed room. thus all i know of arizona right now is that there are a lot of shack-like houses built near the highway that remind me somewhat of vietnam. plus denny's. they have denny's here. oh, and i saw a guy wearing a cowboy hat driving a pickup truck. these things amaze me for some reason. obviously this means i need to leave get off the east coast and see more of the U.S. sometime.
in the papers today there were a whole lot of articles about the prototype machine we've been using at work. depending on which article you read it's either "dishwasher-sized" or "TV-sized." i'd say "TV-sized" is stretching it -- perhaps a big-screen TV. you can judge for yourself from bluegene prototype photos if you wish.
we also got ranked as the #73 fastest computer, which is neat. keep in mind this is only for our 512-node prototype -- the final machine will have 65,000 nodes. so, superfast.
okay, time to sleep. i can't believe they're charging $10/day for internet access in my hotel room. grrr.
Yesterday Microsoft announced it's picked IBM to do the chips for next Xbox game system. And though it doesn't say so in the press release, that probably means PowerPC in place of Intel's x86 architecture, joining other happy PPC users (and IBM clients) like the Nintendo Gamecube, Sony Playstation 3, and Apple G5.
So, uhm, all your games are belong to us now. It seems like a big deal that Microsoft would switch architectures like this -- will they have to port Windows to PPC? Will old games still work? According to Wired, they're going to use the VirtualPC emulator to play old x86 games? That sounds crazy, though; wouldn't an emulator be too slow? I guess IBM's crazy fab technology was enough to convince Microsoft to pull such a big 180 and pick the same architecture as its arch-rivals (Apple, IBM, Sony, etc).
I don't have a G5 yet, but the hardware at work is all PPC and is mad fast. Speaking of work, I just noticed we were in Slashdot last Friday for no good reason, since the article they linked to as "news" was over a year old -- typical, I suppose.
Sorry for the nerdy blogging again. I've been buried in computer science textbooks all week and I suppose it's starting to seep in ...