Techno Musings

Trying to Out-Geek Michael

Just a short blog on how to “out-geek” a visit to the  Transformers Museum by Michael Hay? How about dragging your family to Fermilab, actually, the only one that needed dragging was my wife. The kids loved it. Working in the IT industry for over 25 years, especially as a vendor, has allowed me to work with some of the most influential and forward thinking people, and research groups in the world. However, that  is part of my job. This visit was for fun. Fermilab, home of the now second largest particle accelerator, number 1 going to (CERN’s LHC) in the world. We only made into the visitors center and gift shop since it was a Saturday, but we had a good time and was able to buy some cool souvenirs.

During my years with DEC, I use to be the dedicate on-site engineer for General Atomics where one of my favorite duties was to monitor the VAX systems during times when they would run their experiments of DIII-D, the third largest fusion containment vessel in the world. This device was down in a pit and was essentially a huge powerful magnet use to control a very hot plasma. The bank of CRT monitors in the control center would warp like they were degaussed once the countdown hit “shot!”.

I love these research facilities. They are always looking for ways to push the envelop in everything, especially computing. From high performance computing, high speed networks, high speed storage and file systems, they strive for more. They also push the vendors hard. It’s their extreme requirements that push vendors to do more for less, and this almost always ends up trickling down into the enterprise and into commercial datacenters.

However, my stop by visit to Fermilab was on a whim to introduce my kids to one of the most advance research facilities in the world, or at least one that I could get them to. So, mission accomplished.