Flashes of Panic

I do a certain (small) amount of work on the university’s research cluster for MPOW. The cluster represents one of the better technical advances of the late ’90s: glom together a stack of commodity hardware (sometimes referred to as COTS, or Commercial Off The Shelf,) with the right “glue” software, and you’ve got something which handles specific data- or compute-intensive tasks significantly faster than any individual system would. This is not too far from the cutting edge.

Of course, a significant amount of the software which runs these data- or compute-intensive tasks is legacy code written in Fortran. Don’t laugh.

“GOD is REAL (unless declared INTEGER.)”

Now Playing: Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) from Funeral by The Arcade Fire