Ethernet ate my brain at Supercomputing '95

or

Virtual reality meets high-performance masking tape

by Lynda Lester

First off, I sprained my ankle on the way to the airport. Then when I reached San Diego, I got flight sickness on the glass elevator at the Embassy Suites, thinking about the Towering Inferno and how the elevator had peeled off the wall and crashed. I'd been given a room on the ninth floor. Ninth. I clung to the button panel and refused to look down. When I got off the elevator and went to get ice for my ankle, I walked as far away as I could from the vertiginous balcony and the sheer-death plunge to the goldfish pond nine stories below.

As a newbie, I'd been briefed on what to expect at the Convention Center. When I arrived, I found many friends, more strangers, and a number of security guards with tough expressions like Tommy Lee Jones.

Everything at SC '95 was high performance, even the masking tape. I followed several miles of HP masking tape on the floor till I reached the future site of the NCAR research exhibit: square R32, marked off on the concrete. SCD co-workers and I set to work setting up the booth: one tiny enclave in an echoing, cavernous universe.

I felt anxious when a SCInet person, possibly a replicant, came up to me with a form to fill out. "Ethernet?" he asked. "Asynch? FDDI? I-WAY? GII? IP? vBNS? Zork? Erpl ZZL? PRKFR? Rooba?" Luckily I was rescued by a high-performance guy, who steered me to the NOC booth and supplied the proper HP intelligence.

One fun thing was that every small errand was a 4,000-foot journey. Bathroom, 4,000 feet. Coke, 4,000 feet--and oh, the concessions! The first morning, yet young and foolish, I actually had breakfast: water, bagel, orange juice, coffee: $8.25.

The show opened and we were up and running. Lots of people came by the booth. I talked to earth scientists and computer scientists from India, Italy, Japan, Austria, Australia, and France, all inquiring about NCAR research efforts.

I met people from every part of the U.S.: system administrators, software engineers, hardware vendors, physicists, climate modelers, and some ravenously curious high school students.

I tried to get away from the booth, God knows, I tried. I wanted to talk to the other MetaCenter representatives and spend some time in the press room and see what was happening with the testbed and the CAVE and the WAVE and the WALL, and hear some papers and check out the Featherlite structures, and figure out why the woman in the Cray hologram kept staring at you.

But the people, they kept coming and coming. First in singles and groups, then in droves and armies and masses, and finally entire populations seemed to be coursing through the convention center forming a wave of entities all interested in the NCAR Climate Simulation Lab.

So I kept handing out handouts, and demoing the web site, and talking shop (comparing flux couplers, etc.), and learning about virtual reality in Reading, England, and speaking with the IEEE magazine editor on the merits of paper vs. e-copy. I shook hands with cyberspace pioneer John Barlow, and discussed encryption with SF author David Brin (Earth, The Uplift War).

But sometimes I slipped out to lunch along the beach front.

There was a guy there piling up rocks in Mandlebrot spires; impossibly, they balanced.

I never did go shopping.

At night back at the Embassy, I gazed out the window at the high-rise Hyatt, decorated in red and green lights, and at the nuclear sub parked in the harbor with its own electronic number: 64.