the future is now; also here
I’m currently in Richland, WA, at the Pacific Northwest National Lab, helping these lovely people get their massive supercomputer all Lustre-ized. Having a pretty good time, even if I am missing a neat-o LAN party back home, and even if I am thousands of miles from my wife for two weeks.
The weather here is amazing, probably because we’re in a desert. Lushest damn desert I’ve ever been to, though, what with the massive irrigation thing they’ve got going. And yet, with this oasis of 500 square miles of perfect lawns and trees in the middle of a desert, I have yet to see any wildlife but insects. Kinda creepy.
They do all sorts of crazy science here, from using high-energy light to pick up individual molecules to ripping apart proteins with enormous magnets, and I don’t understand a shred of it. But the people are very friendly — the badge-making woman told me that the only important thing I needed to know from the brochure on site safety was that if I saw other people running I should probably chase them — and the accomodations are surprisingly excellent.
More later, but for now I must return to making our filesystem rock even harder.