Last week I had the pleasure of attending the spring 2024 conference of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) in Washington, DC. I was especially treated to attend (in-person) the Cyberinfrastructure Leadership Academy (CILA) 2024 the day before CASC. [1]
It’s an opportunity to learn about the state of research computing at academic institutions at the U.S. today. Along with SC, it’s also a chance to see in-person a lot of people I mostly encounter over email or as boxes in Zoom meetings.
It’s year-in-review time. I’ve included some short notable points and some of my favorite nature photos of 2023. Here we go.
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Addition to the family – I am now an uncle and that’s pretty cool. 🙂
First SC – Despite a few years working on HPC systems, I’d never attended SC before. I actually felt like a member of the HPC community (beyond just my current workplace) for the first time. Plus I got to hang out and have drinks and food with coworkers. You can read some more of my highly-non-technical impressions here.
Family photos – My project, now a few years in the works, to digitize all my family’s photos is nearing completion. Thousands of photos are now neatly sorted into nice folders on my computer, backed up to a mix of cloud services, and shared online. There could be more to do, but this dramatically increases the discoverability and longevity of these images.
30 – I turned 30 in 2023, the only decade milestone that has ever troubled me. It turned out mercifully anticlimactic. There are areas in my life where I’m not satisfied, but I am happy with my career progression, I like my workplace and my team, and my geographic location is a great fit for me. I wouldn’t want to stop here, because there are other parts of my life that I’ve neglected. However, everyone’s timelines are different, and I believe I’m now well-suited to improve in other areas.
Incremental improvement – I went back and re-read my 2022 year-in-review post. In a lot of ways, 2023 feels like a part two. A lot of what I did either continued or built upon the progress of that year. I’m better at my job, better off financially, and more assured with myself as a person. Like last year, this one was not host to a swath of drastic changes. But looking back over the course of those two years in total, there is unmistakable improvement.
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This has been 2023. I’m still formulating my 2024 plans, but I think 2023 provided a foundation I can build on throughout my thirties.
I had a great time at SC 23. What follows is a series of stray thoughts, some related but others entirely standalone. In a way, that captures the vibe of the six-day event as well as a more coherent narrative might.
Entrance of the convention center. In the middle of the image you’ll see the physical representation of the timeline of SC history.
Seeing people I know through industry or have met through different venues and getting to connect to talk HPC, all in one place, was really exciting.
The free coffee and muffins were also exciting, although I could always do with more coffee. 🙂
I really let myself become a pack rat, since this was my first SC. I wanted to grab as much as I could, so I bought merch at the store as well as a lot of swag and stickers. A number of institutions brought booklets and brochures as well. A few of the items I took were things I would not have if this hadn’t been my first SC, but it was – so I splurged.
We had some great conversations with peers and some vendors about how different systems can be deployed into our HPC environments. In particular we have some systems coming up that will be suited to expanding our work into quantum computing.
I attended several technical workshops. One about memory and energy I found especially interesting, but there was a wide range of topics catering to a mix of HPC specialties.
I appreciated the emphasis that the conference put on this year’s slogan, “I am HPC”, emphasizing the human element of our work. Some of that is diversity and inclusion. Some is developing the workforce. Some involves the networking you get to do at any well-organized trade show. The slogan was a useful lens to consider.
Panel from the “I am HPC” plenary session.
CU Research Computing actually participated in SC. We supplied some hardware (from our retired Summit cluster) for the IndySCC, an event linked to the SC’s annual Student Cluster Competition. It was legitimately a challenging project, but it came together in the end and we’re proud to have played our part.
Outside the convention itself, I also got to spend some time in Denver. A coworker of mine lives in the area and had a recommendation, so we went to a few different spots near the convention center to eat. There were plenty of options for a range of different tastes, including some great vegetarian food that I appreciated.
One llama.
Finally, SC turned out to be a great bonding opportunity for the team: we were all in place, with a common purpose and common vocabulary. We had a booth for RMACC that acted as our home base for some stretches of time. I feel better connected to my teammates because of the experience.
SC 24 is in Atlanta, Georgia, and I am certainly interested in participating again.
Despite now being several years into being an HPC professional, I’ve never attended SC. As such, SC23 will be a time of first impressions. My very first impression: wild that a conference in this admittedly niche line of work fully earns a convention center and an airport-style registration line.
In late September I attended a conference of the National Science Foundation’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure program, on behalf of the University of Colorado Boulder and our research computing team. This year’s event took place in Columbus, Ohio, in a nice convention center.
Visiting Columbus constituted a bit of a return to my past work and home at Earlham College just a few hours from there. I didn’t have time for a visit, but it was a bit nostalgic just the same.
It was also cloudy and cool on arrival, a reprieve from high temperatures we were still experiencing in northern Colorado at the time.
I spoke for about ten minutes on an NSF award we received to expand the Alpine cluster to support more users from the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium (RMACC). This is a project that got picked up by HPCWire using text I drafted alongside RMACC’s executive director. That’s fun!
Some key takeaways:
Computing needs in higher education to continue to grow. This is certainly true of research but it also applies to courses, as the large language model (LLM, colloquially “AI”) surge brings high compute and data storage requirements.
This is perhaps obvious but I think it’s worth saying explicitly: needs and approaches vary widely. Some institutions, like CU, run centralized resources that everyone on campus (as well as external contributors) can use. Others build out dedicated HPC clusters customized for a particular domain science. Still others exclusively run a condo (researcher buy-in) model.
The campus cyberinfrastructure community is very open and friendly. This was my first conference in this program and I never felt out of place.
Researcher trust is central to success in building out campus cyberinfrastructure.
Typing “cyberinfrastructure” over and over again is a pain, which is why they abbreviate it to CC*. 🙂
Ultimately I had a good time. I’m looking forward to implementing this project.
To me, celebrating pride is about celebrating different modes of pursuing happiness. More to the point, it’s about the breaking of arbitrary expectations for gender presentation, identity, and expression. That includes the right to fall in love with someone of the same sex, but it goes well beyond that.
I’m gay, so I’m very much a participant in this month’s celebrations. I’m also a cis male and to outward appearances basically gender-conforming. That’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing – just where I’ve landed. But I like the idea that others enjoy the freedom to be otherwise, that if I felt compelled to change or redefine some aspect of my identity or presentation tomorrow I could, and that the realm of personal freedom keeps expanding.
The opposition is loud and destructive, and it’s reached a fever pitch in the last few years. Transgender people in particular are the targets du jour. I see conservatives trying to drive a wedge between gay/bi and trans people. I see Republicans attacking Pride Month merchandise in stores, shuttering programs promoting diversity, and banning LGBTQ books. Worse, they’re isolating queer kids and queer families in school. They’re making it harder for people to just live as they see fit without doing a bit of harm to anyone else.
In the face of this, my fellow queer people make me proud. These are people living happy, interesting, loving, fulfilling lives despite intimidation and scapegoating. This community gives me hope for the future when it sometimes feels in short supply.
It’s inspiring, and not just in theory and not just for each person individually. We truly have accomplished a lot for the improvement of our society. On a scale of decades, and with plenty of setbacks, America has become more accepting of the wide variety of people who live here. If we (and now I’m including straight folks) can empathize with each other and make a bit of room for other people’s differences, we can continue on that path. To me, that’s what all those rainbow flags and parades are about: celebrating where we’ve been, looking forward to how much better we still have to do.
Evening Tones abstracts a landscape along the Hudson River into a vibrant range of colors. Bluemner came to the United States to escape Germany’s conservatism, hoping to find the freedom to try new ideas. After years of struggling in his architectural practice, he turned to painting, throwing himself into the exciting theories of modern art that were making their way across the Atlantic from Europe. But in the climate of World War I, foreign painters and foreign ideas were suspect. A critic reviewing Bluemner’s work in 1915 avowed that his art was “utterly alien to the American idea of democracy.”
Go back in time. The year 2020 was bad, one of my worst years. Then in 2021, I made up a lot of lost ground. I got vaccinated, started on antidepressants, went to Iceland, got a new job, and moved to Colorado. It turned into one of my best years.
I think I had forgotten what it’s like for a year to be “just fine”, but that’s what I got in 2022 – and when you’re used to extremes, maybe normal feels weird.
All that to say: Not much changed for me this year, which is good. I have a job I love and that pays well. My role at work has shifted but aligns with the same goals I had when I started. I got to visit my parents and siblings several times, and since we’re a close family this was a refreshing change from the last few years. I visited my good friends in the Rio Grande Valley for the first time since before COVID, but otherwise I was relatively grounded in one place.
Particularly beneficial was an improved standard of living. My theme for 2022 was “Year of Upgrades”, and I embraced it — largely in the sense of improving my creature comforts. My desktop PC is vastly better than it was a year ago, now equipped with a shiny new graphics card, processor, and motherboard. The apartment is well-furnished and nicely decorated. I just got a new car. I’m doing all of this while building a reasonable savings balance and a retirement account.
In the material sense, this has unquestionably been a good year. I also recognize the profound luck, privilege, and blessings in my life that have paved the way here. As such, I’ve recently been scaling back my personal consumer buys and boosting my charitable giving. I intend to continue that in the next year.
Separate from buying cool stuff, I also worked on some great projects this year:
Family photo digitization. See my notes in this post. There’s more left to do, but I have a system in place now that can readily process new photos as we find them.
Family history document digitization. A closely-related effort to my work with the family photos. Way back in junior high, I did a genealogy project. I gathered a plastic tub full of documents and pictures from my family history. This year, at long last, I scanned and shared those files. This is another project I will probably continue on-and-off for a while.
Cleaning and transcribing a taped interview with a WWII veteran. This is one I would absolutely love to share more detail about someday, but for now it’s not mine to share. I’ll just say that if you have old audio tapes, it’s generally possible to read them into a computer using Audacity and then transcribe them using Whisper. Pretty amazing project.
Migrating from Twitter to Mastodon. I created accounts on a few Mastodon servers and hooked up my blog to a little instance for easy sharing in the Fediverse. Twitter is basically read-only to me at this point and Mastodon is where I post social content now. Maybe one day that will change — who knows?
Dabbled with Stable Diffusion to do some AI image generation. Not much to say here and I don’t have any good outputs to share. But I do think AI technology like this is an impressive new tool for creating digital art.
Projects are never completed, they’re just abandoned, but these are at least honorably abandoned. Several produced seeds for new projects that I’ll tend to next year.
While 2022 felt oddly subdued compared to its predecessors, it was a good year for me by any reasonable metric. There is more to do in 2023, but I ended up in a pretty good place.
I wish you and your loved ones a happy new year and a lovely 2023.
Discussions are ongoing about the viability of summer travel given the pandemic. However, as my colleague Charlie has blogged recently, we are “acting as if”. As such, we are trying to maintain our original calendar.
Lo and behold, we have:
Imagine a “You are here” arrow by Spring 1
Here’s the full breakdown of that schedule and our progress:
Our plan for the fall was to find and test alternative UAV’s. This proved prudent, as the federal government banned DJI craft late last year. We are happy with both the Parrot and the Skydio craft, for different reasons which we’ll undoubtedly cover here on this blog in the future.
December and January, which were effectively a long winter break for a subset of us, were dedicated to testing the craft, capturing initial video, and possibly beginning development. This was a success as well. Additionally we have begun spinning up a more sophisticated web presence for the stories we’re telling – changes we will be prepared to publish soon.
We’ve now started the calendar for the spring, term 1 of 2. We are moving into scaling up our operation of the craft and developing software to automate that work. It’s a tough problem but one we can solve in the time we have.
We’re optimistic about our ability to meet the moment. If the world continues to make progress on COVID-19, we should be in shape to have a successful research trip.
You don’t need me to tell you 2020 was a bad year. Others will write about the details that apply nationally and globally, so I’m going to jump right into my own retrospective.
The 2020 wallowing
I was planning on a trip to Iceland followed by a new job with room for advancement in 2020. Instead I stayed at my current job (a good job!), made an attempt at a side hustle that has so far largely fizzled, and was obviously not able to go to Iceland. I didn’t visit family in Montana for Thanksgiving or Christmas. At work, I made a few dumb mistakes (we did rebound in each case, happily). It was, on net, a rough year.
That’s about all I have to say about that. I don’t want to wallow too much, but I also don’t want to go further without acknowledging the struggle.
The better stuff
All that said, the rest of this post summarizes my accomplishments for the year. I write this to remind myself that even though it didn’t generate those external signals, I still did a lot. I advanced my skillset, did my job well, and patched through the year.
Accomplishments:
Got out of bed every day and went back to sleep every night
Kept Earlham CS running through the pandemic, student dispersal, lockdown, and restricted return
Modernized our systems engineering infrastructure with better monitoring, solid backups, improved responsiveness to inquiries, and higher availability – still a long way to go, but we’re so much better than we were a year ago
For each error I made, rebounded and learned a lesson
Migrated our cluster infrastructure from Torque to Slurm successfully
Learned a bunch of low-level details about filesystems, SELinux, and more en route to improving overall quality
Took 10,000 steps most days and got outside frequently
Provided a lot of internal tech support, engineering, feedback, and project contributions to the projects associated with the Iceland program
Made checking LinkedIn a regular part of my routine, though I should use it more socially in the new year
Purely as a hobby, learned a ton about video and audio production
Casual observation: I posted a lot in February, and my tech achievements primarily happened over the summer.
I also want to dedicate a section to expanding my horizons. I couldn’t do it with travel, but there were a lot of new things I got the chance to explore this year:
On Spotify, listened to 1,408 new artists and 366 new genres (“genre” seems like a nebulous category, but I am taking the win)
Watched a lot of new movies, including the complete Hayao Miyazaki filmography
Baked a pie – apple – for the first time, at Christmas
Grew my hair long for the first time in my life (it’s still growing actually – not getting a professional haircut during a pandemic)
Visited and walked new hiking trails
That was 2020 for me.
What’s next?
I can’t guarantee 2021 will be better than this year. However, I do have some broad intentions around a theme for the new year. I will do all that is in my control to make the next year better, and I hope you join me.
