SC07: the nightlife

So I had two events to attend, overlapping of course (of course). Beobash and a dinner with Microsoft. John and I got to Beobash and I spoke with Chris Samuel of VPAC and some associates from Australia. Doug Eadline interviewed me (and I didn’t have the slightest clue as to what I was going to say, so it came out rather funny sounding, sorry Doug). I spoke with lots of good people. This is an interesting group.

Then I ran off (late) to dinner with Microsoft. Spoke to Kyril Faenov from Microsoft and Tom Farrell from Dell. It was an enjoyable conversation, though I think I was rambling: I was running on fumes. I think much has changed in Microsoft’s outlook over time in clusters. I get a sense that they are interested in working with what people use today. This is good. I am not hearing a replacement theology, but a partnership view. This is something I think we can work with. It doesn’t bother me if an end user wants to run a particular OS to run a job. On the contrary, I want to enable this to occur painlessly. Most users won’t care about the OS, this is an “implementation detail” to be dealt with by the sysadmins. Microsoft is still finding its way. Kyril and the group were good to talk to, I enjoyed this (though I was just a little late … only an hour and a half :( ). That said, the nightlife is still going on, but I am falling asleep, and I still have work to do ….