GridCentric SC09 Wrap-up

We spent last week in beautiful Portland, Oregon for the SC 2009 International Conference on HPC, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. In between visits to various brewpubs and our gastronomic home base, we managed to get the following done:

• Hung out at the Compute Canada booth with Mike Bauer, John Morton and others from SHARCNET, Susan Baldwin from Compute Canada, as well as Cameron Kiddle from the U of Calgary / WestGrid (who showed us a cool demo of GeoChronos) at the Monday night Opening Gala.
  
• Attended the IBM Customer Reception, where we had beers with Neil Bunn (IBM), Jill Kowalchuk (Cybera), Florent Parent (Clumeq), and many others (thanks to Neil for the invite!).
• Went to the SGI Innovators Breakfast where we met with Paul Lu (U of Alberta) and talked about the GridCentric platform's technological underpinnings (thanks to Daniel St-Germain for the invite!). This was one of the few alcohol-free events we attended.
• Spoke with Josh Simons (Sun) about the convergence of HPC and Enterprise technologies. You should read his blog, especially his HPC writings.
• Showed our demo to Daniel Chavarría from PNNL, who gave us helpful feedback and words of encouragement.
  
• Spoke with folks from Mellanox, QLogic, and Myricom about hardware support for virtualization in their Infiniband and 10GigE adapters. Turns out they've supported it for years.
• Spoke at length with Gregor von Laszewski about the NSF FutureGrid project, which will act as a testbed for HPC grid/cloud platforms and software stacks - perfect for evaluating the GridCentric platform and getting ourselves on the U.S. government's radar.
  
• Had beers with Daniel Gruner (SciNet) at the Thursday Closing Event (which was quite nice!), then went on to have more beers with Danny at another pub whose name escapes me (although I recall it had over 100 beers on tap).

Overall, it was an exhausting week (bookended by some atrocious connector flights), but we made a lot of friends and are much the wiser. We're really looking forward to SC10!

Office move

It's been a while since our last update, but we've been pretty busy (more on that later). With the investment from RCI also came a move to their newly renovated space for Rogers Ventures companies. This transformation has been quite significant, so I wanted to share it.

Those that had visited us in our old offices know that they were a bit cramped (especially the weeks leading up to the move as we grew to six). We like to think that it was a stereotypical start-up, and gives us a great "it all started in an attic" (literally) story.

First: the developer's desks. In the main room of our office, four people were in fairly close quarters. Meanwhile, Tim and I shared two sides of another small Ikea desk. Great for extreme programming, but not so great on those hot august days! :)

Workstations 1.0

Workstations 2.0

Our new workspaces are much more spacious -- enough for multiple machines and monitors and a good place to organize and post notes. Unlimited productivity, here I come!

In our old office, Tim and I shared a room with three fairly noisy servers and several pedestal servers. Not that the others had it much better; noise wasn't really containable in our space. You'll also see our enormous 12,000 BTU air conditioner at the bottom left of this photo.

Server Room 1.0

Server Room 2.0

I would say that one of the best features of our new office is the rack space. Now we can hide away our servers and not worry about tripping over the power cord! (Also we don't have to worry about blowing a fuse!)

We nick-named a portion of our old office "the idea board". This was the coffee space and the white board. Shown below is the idea board in the last few days before we moved -- when it also served as storage space for the blue boxes to be packed up with our stuff.

Idea Board 1.0

Idea Board 2.0

As you can see from the photo on the right, the size of the white board has at least tripled (it's yet to been seen whether the ideas will triple). We've also got some great space to relax and meet. The only thing left to do is decide what to do with the old idea board.