Supercomputing trip

Part of the Supercomputing conference show floor.

Earlier this week I came back from a two-week trip to the USA. In three short weeks, Lee Ann and I will head back to Albuquerque to meet up with the kids and friends over Christmas and New Year's. The main purpose of my last trip was to attend and give a talk at the annual Supercomputing conference. It's a large conference with about 10,000 attendees each year. Different from most computer science conferences, it also has a large show floor with lots of vendors demonstrating their latest products, universities and research labs explaining their latest work. Because it is the premier conference in our field, it attracts a large attendance and is a great opportunity to network. I was lucky enough to have one of my papers pass peer review and get accepted for presentation at the conference.

When I arrived in Salt Lake City, a storm was bringing this Winter's first snow to the region. It was nice to be cold and see with my eyes that there was a reason for it ;-)

Supercomputing moves around within the USA each year. This year it was in Salt Lake city. Next year it will be in Denver. I flew from Dublin to New York and visited IBM Research at Watson. A lot of people there were still out of power from the storm Sandy hitting the region.
While on the East coast I also visited Michela Taufer at the University of Delaware and gave a talk at their weekly colloquium. Then it was off to Salt Lake for Supercomputing. And then I spent a weekend with Anika in the bay area.

Kurt and I went up a nearby hill one evening to take a picture of Salt Lake City at dusk.

Supercomputing was, as usual, interesting and very busy. This year I spent much more time in the technical sessions than one the show floor. There were quite a few interesting papers presented. Also as usual, there were quite a few people I ran into whom I haven't seen in a while (or as recently as a week ago) and the days were long with discussions going on late into the night over dinner and drinks.
It felt almost like a mini vacation after that to fly to Oakland to visit Anika at Mills. She is, unbelievably, in her third year there and we had a great weekend together.

Down at the wharf with Golden Gate in the background.

We visited San Francisco a couple of times -- once to have dinner with Dilma who used to lead our group out of Watson, but then left for a job in the bay area -- but also drove down to Monterey to see the aquarium and have dinner in Santa Cruz. The pictures from the aquarium are on picasa.

At the Monterey aquarium.

Somewhere in between all this traveling, we learned that Anika had been accepted to spend her semester abroad in Leeds, England; a 30-minute flight to Manchester and a car rental, or a boat trip and a short train ride away from Dublin.

Anika in her new Winter coat.

While we were in San Franciso, we came across this charming little hotel. Given some of the people we saw in that area, it is probably a fine place to stay. We needed some change for the tram down to Fisherman's Wharf and thought about buying a donut at Donut World to get it. After seeing the clientele there we decided to go to the California Bakery around the corner. Still a little bit iffy, but yummy ;-)

I wonder how much business they get?

I tried to find the hotel above (it's on Stevenson street) online to see what they charge and what the reviews are like, but was unsuccessful. On the other side of it is Market street and the building next door houses an adult cinema. Next to that is the Aida hotel, which may share a wall or a door to Hotel One. The reviews for Aida are amazing (follow the link to Tripadvisor): It gets five excellent reviews and is ranked 198th out of 237 hotels in San Francisco. That's despite that some of the reviews mention cockroaches, bloody bedsheets, and "scary people hanging around at the hotel door"! Man, and Hotel One doesn't even make it onto Tripadvisors. What snobs!