Day 2: SC15

Harrison has shotgunned writing about Alan Alda so I won't steal his thunder. Suffice to say, I could not be more excited about seeing my favourite TV actor of all time! His message was so simple yet so challenging. 

After Alan's keynote we jumped a bus out to Texas University and TACC (the Texas Advanced Computing Centre). Travis has shotgunned writing about that so...

What's left for me is to tell you that this afternoon we sat in on a brilliant panel session about Post-Moore's Law. The expert panel from Intel, IBM and a number of universities discussed what happens when the digital computers of today can no longer continue to advance. The discussion covered a number of alternatives but focused on Quantum and Neuromorphic Computers. Everyone seemed to agree that these technologies are not poised to take over from digital computers but, the future holds a homogeneous hybrid of the available technologies. Some of the analysts were quite passionate about their views, especially the Intel candidate who doesn't believe we are coming to the end of Moore's Law. His view is that we will have, "More of Moore".

Afterwards we attended the invited talks where Rosa Badia, Team Leader of the Workflows and Distributed Computing Research Group from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, spoke about Superscalar Programming Models. A rather heady topic well explained. Next on the bill was David Wecker, Architect of Emerging Technologies at Microsoft who gave an in-depth overview of their Quantum Computer Simulator and compiler LIQui|> (Language Integrated Quantum Operations) and SoLi|> (Son of LIQui|>). Microsoft have released their technologies in the hope that people will begin to investigate and learn the programming paradigms and techniques even before the hardware is mature and available.

I think today captured the boys' imaginations. There was much discussion afterwards about these new and emerging technologies. It has been a big day!