Ohio: July 2025: Day 4: PEARC25 and Ohio State University

Ohio

July 2025: Day 4: PEARC25

Breakfast potatoes were crispy and delicious.

The one just okay breakfast item at The Joseph: the breakfast sandwich.

Well-presented but flavors out of balance. Not enough sausage.

Dell sales pitch. Up to 1MW per rack coming in next generation.

Hoyo's Kitchen inside North Market. Menu.

Menu.

Chicken, beef, goat...

Injera bowl with goat was pretty good.

Close-up.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory HPC documentation.

Workshops = helpful, office hours = not helpful.

So many conference rooms.

Ohio State University.

Goody Boy Diner menu.

It's Restaurant Week here too?

They were not busy, still took more than 15 minutes for mussels to come out?

20 more minutes between burger and mussels.

Burger was... fine?

45 more minutes between burger and some awful, soggy beignets.

Inside is cute at least.

So so so so slow here. Avoid.

After one excellent and one good breakfast, had a half-good, half-so-so one today at the hotel. The breakfast sandwich was a miss, but the sides held up their end of the bargain.

In additional to the usual panels and sessions, one of the vendor ones today was quite good. Even though most research computing is not necessarily bleeding edge in its requirements, Dell still showed off some of their bleeding edge hardware. Seeing rack power densities at 480kW per rack and scaling to 1MW per rack was quite interesting, since that's not a power density we typically see-- there has been plenty of discussion about cooling as power densities go up, but seeing the power delivery discussed in more detail was very welcome.

Additional sessions were highlighted by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who went to a useful level of detail on user feedback after their training. Quite helpful to reinforce what works and what does not work for your users.

Post-conference highlights were a pretty tasty lunch of Somali food at Hoyo Kitchen, plus an evening walk to Ohio State University. The latter was mostly just to say I'd been, plus a convenient excuse to go to a nearby Waffle House. Waffle House ended up being a fail, as it was a delivery-only location (!). The random and unfortunate decison for dinner ended up being Goody Boy Cafe, which was participating in 614 Restaurant Week, a seeming good deal at $20 for appetizer, entree, and dessert. Mussels were a generous portion for the price and quite edible*, ditto for the fries, burger was so-so, beignets were awful. Ended up being a downright terible meal as it took something like 90 minutes, which is absolutely ridiculous for a diner.

* = I did not die of food poisoning.