Day 3: SC15

Another big day at SC15! We had a later start today as there was nothing for us in the morning. Always nice to have a sleep in.

Our first session was a discussion of Black Holes by Dr. Manuela Campanelli, professor of Mathematics and Astrophysics at Rochester Institute of Technology. She spoke about how two colliding black holes form a supermassive black hole. The process is one of the most energetic in the universe, producing more light than is normally produced by the rest of the universe.

Unfortunately, we had to cut our time in this talk short as we had a press conference to give to HPC-Wire, the official HPC news site (http://www.hpcwire.com). Jon Bashor, LBNL (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Computing Sciences Communications Manager interviewed the teams from FLCR, QASMT and JMSS as well as Professor David Abramson. The students spoke well as we outlined the work we've been doing in HPC club, the sensor project and the SC trips inspired and facilitated by Prof. Abramson. Watch the HPC-Wire site to see our article.

We then had a grilled-cheese sandwich and a walk around town in search of souvenirs.

After lunch, we attended a discussion of modelling disease outbreaks by Keith Bisset of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. He discussed how they use a number of mathematical models to predict the spread of disease, including the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

We then took a walk through the Student Cluster Competition where university students from around the US, and one Australian team from the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in WA, build clusters of computers to process real-world data and impress learned judges.

We finished the day with dinner at the Iron Works Texas Bar-B-Que with the two other Australian teams. You can see more about that in our travel blog... http://sc15travel.blogspot.com