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ok, so it is later tonight, officially, at the “Gala” event. The “usual crew” of bloggers will be there, as will lots of friends and colleagues from the past. Someone once told me that Supercomputing is quite incestuous: they steal … er hire from each other with abandon. It is always enjoyable to visit and see friends with new business cards, new digs, and similar stories of how company X is in the decline and Y is ascendent.

SGI is here, in force. This is not your authors SGI. Not the company I left more than half a decade ago. I might run into a few friend and colleague hanger ons, but most of the old talent has left the building. They have emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy paying something like 14 cents on the dollar, a trimmer organization, aiming at very difficult markets with entrenched players and a not sufficiently differentiated product line. Since I no longer can post at or read sgi.bad-attitude (wow do I miss that), I can’t see the real thoughts of the people who are missioned to make it work, and suffer the consequences when it doesn’t. IBM has, as usual, its small country-sized force here. I am sure HP does as well. The smaller companies come and go: while some are ascendent, some are known to be on the decline. While I am here, a secondary mission I have is recruiting for an opening we have on-site at a customer. Lots of other secondary missions as well. Will fix the camera issue, hopefully before tonight, and the Gala. The most interesting aspect of this show to me will likely be the accelerators (3 different groups coalescing around their technologies), and the storage, as well as the interest in our product, a little 5U 36TB unit we call JackRabbit: bigger (in capacity), faster (per RAID controller and in total), here (hare) today, and reasonably priced. The day job site will have more soon. Will go to a few BOF’s, meet some people, take some pictures. Will have dinner with Microsoft, and see if they can either tweak the time so that we can get to beobash or divide my time between the two. There are lots of interesting talks, and I plan on going to a few.