Ohio: July 2025: Day 3: PEARC25 and COSI

Ohio

July 2025: Day 3: PEARC25 / COSI

Pancakes with berries at The Joseph were pretty good.

First keynote of PEARC25.

Still less than 1,000 (less than 950) registrants.

Penn State presentation on HPC credits and burn rate for users.

Lan Viet Kitchen at North Market. Edible.

Edible.

Gui cuon (shrimp spring rolls) kinda too skinny.

Are those rubber bands?

Four kinds of lettuce and one kind of basil growing at the convention center.

I think this was Clemson's asynchronous HPC User Onboarding presentation.

Julich Supercomputing Center's HPC user onboarding.

CASC NIST 800-171 session was packed.

Star Wars fan exhibit at COSI.

It's superb, but you can tell it's not quite as detailed as the originals.

Upgrading the rubber duck.

Honda manual transmission.

Chasmosaurus belli.

Stegosaurus stenops.

Yutyrannus.

Megalodon.

Whale shark.

Beef at Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse was very good.

Beef, cheese, and tomato?

Thanks AMD!

In addition to the surprisingly good collection of art, breakfast at The Joseph is also very good-- and even better since it was free. Can't say every item was good, but I would say more than half was quite tasty, including this morning's pancakes as well as yesterday's steak and eggs (yum!).

PEARC25 went from workshops and tutorials to normal sessions today, had quite a few on HPC training and user onboarding; was good to see all what other research centers, universities, and national labs are doing. Nothing groundbreaking, but good to share experiences and useful tips. Efforts to support HPC with sensitive data are growing, which showed in a NIST 800-171 session that drew so much interest it was standing room only. Lunch at nearby North Market, a local food hall, ended up at so-so Vietnamese food spot.

Center of Science and Industry Museum (COSI) hosted the PEARC25 party. Highlight was a fan-made Star Wars exhibit, which was surprisingly high quality, including several full-scale replicas. You can absolutely tell it wasn't up to the spec of the originals, but for fan-made stuff, still a crazy amount of effort. Most of the rest of the museum was more of a cross between children and adults, so maybe not quite as headline-worthy as some other museums for this sort of thing, but still worth a good two hours. They even had a Honda section, which makes sense given there's a Honda factory in Columbus; this section of the museum actually made me wish the target audience was more for adults as the engineering details were a bit lighter than I would have preferred.

Juuuuust managed to squeeze in a vendor party that night; still not sure why four vendors had two parties the same night as the conference party. Ended up at Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse for the Lenovo-AMD combined party. The beef tenderlion was good (although maybe should not have been surprised given it's a steakhouse), seeing sushi on the menu was an actual surprise. Not sure it's a weird Columbus thing, but even if just California rolls and whatnot, the sushi wasn't bad either.