You’ve got to admire someone who has avision, almost as much as someone who is prepared to use the word vision.
So here’s a plug for Nicolas Erdody, founder of
OpenParallel
, and more importantly the organiser of
Erdody’s well aware that computer hardware power – where many cores (essentially singlecomputers) can be placed on a single chip – has advanced beyond the IT industry’s ability toprogram for such beasts.
In this light, he’s put together for a third consecutive year a two-day conference at
Naturally Erdody’s keen to get as many attendees to the world-class event as possible (justunder $1000 for full attendance, including a conference dinner on the Tuesday night).
Equally he wants NZ Inc to wake up to the realisation that there’s a real opportunity for ourcollective psyche and IT infrastructure to ride the just-beginning wave of programming possibilitiesthat exist around multicore coding.
Erdody’s passionate that a concentrated effort of NZ government, commercial interest,engineering and developers’ communities, R&D and academia could provide programming solutionsfor multicore.
Given that multicore’s parallel coding requirements are weightless, location agnostic, and anincreasing problem needing to be solved, Erdody’s dead right about the opportunity.
Rounding up the collective cats to bring it to fruition, even in a country as only two degrees ofseparation connected as New Zealand has been an ongoing challenge for the Oamaru (yes, you read thatright), former Uruguayan businessman.
However he must be doing something right. After two years staging the event in Wellington, forthe third conference Erdody has pulled Auckland’s AUT (Auckland University of Technology) onboardas one of the sponsors, along with well-known open source software promoters
There are more than 20 speakers at MCW2014, with over two-thirds of them from overseas.
Erdody would love to see as many IT managers, CTOs and CIOs, engineers and developers as possibleat what is cutting edge thinking – and what is sure to be an inside look at where computing isheading in the immediate and not-to-distant future.
In a sense (though Erdody’s too polite to say this), anyone connected with the IT industry ateven a slightly senior level would be a fool not to be there – if not for the speaker quality,then for the informal conversations which alone can often be worth the price of admission.
Additionally, on February 27 & 28, Erdody’s helped organise in association with AUT’s Dr.Andrew Ensor and Prof. Sergei Gulyaev a
(Incidentially, Open Parallel is the only New Zealand company that leads a work package of,admittedly a small part of a huge international effort, the design phase of the SKA. OpenParallel’s contribution to the SKA isn’t funded by the NZ government, and, as a result, Erdodywould appreciate international sponsorship or donors for the effort).
Finally, and getting back to the ‘vision thing’ (
Our country could position itself as a centre of excellence and make lots of money by solvingmulticore programming problems for others.
Who is up for the discussion, the challenge and the prospect?
(In particular, government-type advisers looking for the next big thing, are you listening?)