haha, remember spending four years writing in 8086 assembler code, until the C compilers generated useful code. Remember spending four months writing a Base 10,000 math package, sort/merge using qsort, pcode interpreter runtime for a Cobol compiler. I loved doing it and still remember it as some of the best fun I had at the time. For me it was always about the challenge, of course the stock options and bonuses made the IRS and me very happy. Lost a girlfriend after I started and gained girlfriend before the next task, repeat as needed until death.

Lyle

Yeah, 1976 I bought a kit for the Imsai 8080A with two 5 1/4 floppy drives from Horizon, which came with HDOS. Soldered everything up myself, including 7-8Kbyte memory cards for a whopping 56Kbytes, ADM3A monitor... It was a challenge back then on home computers, no programming languages, except HBASIC from Horizon which wasn't much more than Dec EduBasic on the original Dec 10's. Wrote my own Assembler, Editor and Fortran compiler for it. I can't even begin to imagine how much 8080/8088 assembler code I wrote over the next 10 years... I started programming in 1969 with a ASR 33 teletype connected to a computer center in Seattle and Fortran using IBM keypunch machines using punch cards at the University of Washington on their mainframe.

Lyle

I'm doing some MPI work on Azure as a experiment for the company I work for. We have it working and the EXTRA-LARGE nodes are pretty good for CPU bound work, 14 Gigabytes of memory, 8 cores, and a Terabyte of disk space. But the network isn't much to talk about, it is GigE and MPI runs pretty slow on it. Deployment is good and fast, I can put Ansys Fluent 13 on it and run some benchmarks and get usable results. However, the license server is in our corpnet and we had to setup a secure VPN connection from the Azure nodes to access the license server for lmgrd to work. So, there's a lot of moving parts for it now, but it suppose to get better hearing Microsoft talk about it...:) Rep was even saying something about Infiniband QDR, dedicated hardware and GPU support in the future.

Lyle

I know I was hooked the first time I played the game using nothing but the 3 book set, handful of dice and graph paper in Hawaii in 1976. What a blast that was, six of us computer geeks sitting in a living room for 20+ hours straight on weekends, arguing about the damage a dwarf should really have. Now, we play WOW, GuildWars, ..., etc and think nothing of the skill required to create the world we play in. We whine and complain about the people we play with around the world, thinking nothing of the people who started it all. God speed Gary, hope the 20's keep rolling.

Lyle