Fascinating day.. Woke up in Tarrytown New York with no idea where I was.. I lay in bed for a few minutes trying to figure out where I was and why.. It’s was fun and disconcerting (which is better  than disconcerting and fun)   I’d driven down with my friend  Steve last night  to go to a meeting in Yorktown with folks from the University of Vermont and IBM scientists.  
  The meeitng today was very cool.. mathematicians. physicists, operations research, medical researchers.. all looking for common ground. We were looking for ways to collaboate around IBM’s smarter Planet ideas and UVM’s complex systems concentration.. I think we came up with some cool threads to work.
   A bonus of today’s visit was a set of tours.. First stop was a visit to Yorktown’s large Bluegene supercomputer. It’s one of hte most powerful computers in the world (outside of a government facility.) . Many of my friends worked on this thing.. it’s an amazing piece of technology.. and a work of art..  albeit a very loud piece of art.

The supercomputer is made of several long rows of racks.. all canted at a funny angle.

Company lore says that the original build of the device had the racks placed at an angle to facilitate cooling.. the graphics design folks  liked the fact that the racks were angled.. but they didn’t think they were angled enough. Consequently.. the outside  frames are canted at a steeper angle than the inside.. Life emulates art.

ps. the pattern on my jacket is some sort of bizarre optical illusion. that must have something to do with the lighting.. My jacket is a really boring pattern.. The camera made it psychedelic.   Cooooool

It was really fun looking through the guts of this thing.. I felt really proud.. I was a minor player in the creation of the 10’s of thousand of chips that make up the machines ‘brains’ .

After touring Bluegene.. we took a quick outside tour of a new solar idea that’s being developed in yorktown. the idea is to concentrate more of the sun on a solar cell that usual.. In this case, they were concentrating 2000 equivalent suns on a Gallium Arsenide solar cell cooled by liquid gallium.   As a result.. they were able to get about 75 watts from a 1 cm**2  cell (that’s PHENOMENAL !)

Around 1:30 I wandered down to the lobby and stumbled into a party for a bunch of friends in the communications are of IBM. It was awesome seeing these guys.. I really like them all..   I was having so much fun talking to all of them that I didn’t see the car that had been sent to pick me up. After about 30 min, I realized I was still standing there.. I called and realized that the poor driver had been waiting quietly for me to walk outside.
   The driver was an awesome guy.. Ruddy.. we had a great tlak on the way down to NYC. He told me all of the cool/weird/awesoem/horrible folks he gets to/has to drive around. For example.. He drives Christopher Walken around.. how cool is that ?! (more cowbell !)
  Even with the late start, I got to my meeting in the city in plenty of time.. I  was going to ogilvy.. IBM’s add agency where I’m doing a project around our Smarter Planet stuff. I love goign there. the folks are all so cool and smart. I’m finding I love watching other folks..differnt non-engineering folks.. work .

And besides.. they have a warthog made out of tires in their lobby. Whay wouldn’t I love them ?