Powers Unfiltered

I have been invited to speak at a conference on High Throughput Computing at the UK National e-Science Center in Edinburgh next week.  This is extraordinary on a number of levels.

• First, the event is called “High Throughput Computing Week.”  If someone had told you five years ago that there was a “High Throughput Computing Day,” you might well have asked “how will they fill the afternoon?”  But there will be four days packed with great content at this event.
• Second, I am an economist, not a computer scientist.  I am likely to be among the least knowledgeable attendees along a number of important dimensions, yet I will be expected to provide some useful information.
• Finally, I work with very few scientists; most of Digipede’s customers are mainstream enterprises running relatively mundane production applications.  The field of e-Science is of interest, but definitely not the primary focus of our firm.

Yet I accepted the invitation enthusiastically, and went the extra mile to commit to a three-hour workshop (which meant “volunteering” Dan Ciruli for the trip as well).  To be sure, part of the value of this trip will be seeing customers — we have two current Digipede customers and one partner in Edinburgh.  But I also think we’ll have something interesting to contribute to the event; many of our customers use the Digipede Network to solve high-throughput computing problems, and I think attendees will be interested in hearing about that experience.  We’re also pretty excited about the opportunity to learn more about what leading academic and business HTC users are doing. 

I’ll report more from the show.