Z11

Day 2 of the deRSE conference. The conference was sponsored by Amazon so they got to give the second keynote. It was a very interesting talk on CDK, their cloud development toolkit that simplifies describing cloud infrastructure in python among other languages. I was pleased to hear that it can target other cloud platforms and spit out terraform and kubernetes code. Following on cloudy topics was a great presentation on MetaHub a registry for HPC containers. HPC containers are different in that you need much more information than for normal containers to decide which flavour to download. I really liked the session on heterogeneous computing. I should really revisit OpenMP and look at what it offers these days for using accelerators. Today's most amazing talk was on a art/science collaborative project where an orchestra performed a musical piece. The scientists recorded data from the audience and generated a new musical score that was performed by the orchestra shortly later (after 5 minutes). Unfortunately no recording exists since it was meant to be unique which also helps with data protection issues. 

I also got to spend some time in the computer museum. We got an excellent tour. I found one of my things in the museum. The museum is great. It starts off with a history of writing and number systems and how we do calculations. Then there are historic computers such as the Z11 which is the last electromechanical computer Zuse built and an updated version of the Z3. The Z11 had a hardwired program that could do additions, subtractions, division, multiplication, square roots, series expansion, matrix and vector calculations and solve linear systems of equations. There were a number of these computers that were mostly used for land reform after the WW2. The museum is well worth the visit.

Some more photos from the museum on flickr.