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Early morning airport musings

November 15, 2008

I am sitting at RDU airport, waiting for my plane to board heading back to the Pacific Northwest for a day before heading out to Supercomputing 08.

Yesterday was a blast. Chris Lasher and Co pulled out the red carpet and were wonderful hosts. I was also able to take part in some very interesting discussions on everything from cloud computing to social networks with graduate students and faculty alike.

I really have no idea how the talk went. It was a new talk, something I hope to extend over the coming months as I spend more time fleshing out this idea that big science, data-driven science needs to be built upon collective intelligence on the fabric of the World Wide Web. But the discussion afterwards and later at dinner, etc convince me that there is hope as the grad students of today get into the workforce. The ones I met, perhaps self selecting, but I don’t think so, were bright, curious, somewhat idealistic, and seemed to get it. Get why we need to have our data available, why we need access layers, why we need virtualized computing, etc etc.

Alright, time for some more coffee