SC24 Recap & Fuzzball Federate Sneak Peek

so necessary and not everyone is good at it so you are good at it so thank you for taking up that job we very much appreciate it and Mr Brian hey everyone Brian Phan here I'm an HPC engineer here at ciq uh I work primarily on fuzzball as well but I also work with um all of the ciq software stack and putting Solutions together you do you do and thank you for that as well okay cool so let's talk about SC you guys we were in Atlanta for super Computing 24 just a couple of weeks ago and uh we want to talk about what are

like some of your most favorite moments I got to say the Dell AI did you guys make it over there to like where like the they had the Dell AI like platform where it was what do you call those little like those cubes that that container cubes they had like two giant container cubes you could like walk in and go all the way to the top and then a SE A View From the top of the whole conference I did not make it over there I saw it from the outside and I heard several people talk about it but no I pretty much stuck to

the booth I walked the floor a little bit um kind of before the the floor opened and uh talked to some other folks um that were you know presenting and setting things up but no I pretty much stuck to the booth mostly the entire time yeah well that was also fun there we had a really we had a really good time in a really beautiful Booth so thank you all the people behind the scenes that made that beautiful Booth happen um Jonathan did you get to see the from the top no honestly same same kind of story with Dave I at least on the show

floor I spent most of the time at our booth and then you know we had some customer conversations and um and meetings outside I did go to a couple BFFs that we can talk about at some point but yeah for the most part on the show floor stuck around the booth and talked to people that were coming around to ask us about what we were doing and there was a lot it was very active I mean we had our meeting room uh somebody in there all times of the day and somebody doing a presentation or just a lot of activity a lot of questions a

lot of really it was really really exciting awesome Brian did you get to see it from up top yeah yeah I did make it to the Dell AI Booth uh snapped a couple panoramic photos and a couple videos from there but yeah yeah it was pretty cool yeah awesome so what else kind of stuck out to you at the conference uh I think I forget which Booth it was they had an airplane there with some QR code type of things on there and then they had a video a camera pointing to this plane and then a computer hooked up to this camera and they basically

had a simulation running of the plane model uh in real time which was kind of cool I wanted to jump inside that airplane so bad and then the after hours every time I walk by it I'm like looking around I was like hey don't do it Rose don't do it no one's watching no one's watching totally yeah we had a little conversation about that as we walked by didn't we we I was like anyone looking Dave I'm going for it no I what a bummer if it like I don't even know if it like tilted down or like somehow bro oh my gosh I'd be

so embarrassed oh one of the vendors that I that I did notice at the show is a at least it's a new name to me is vidora um which is a storage vendor that's formerly known as panassus and they have the same parallel file system I've been interested in it for quite a while and my understanding is that the rebranding is part of an effort to like historically Paces has been an appliance that you buy from them and that they're branching out and trying to sell their software as a solution you can get from a number of different vendors which I think is a really

good strategy for them and I hope will make them a bit more competitive in the market they they've had their supporters and and they've had a really good solution for a while so I'm I'm excited to see more opportunity for that getting in out into more people's hands um but from the attracting attention perspective they had I should know the guy's name but some famous weightlifter um oh the mountain come on the mountain there we go they had they had the mountain there lifting pedabytes of storage and then they were taking uh taking guesses from the audience on how many pedabytes he would be able

to lift and I think I just missed that I think I they had him out front and people were taking selfies with him but I was I was the the dork in the back trying to find an engineer to tell me about the the file system while that was going on that's awesome yeah he actually stopped by and played a little Street Fighter I I missed but there's a picture of him playing Street Fighter at our booth that's great that's awesome okay so what else what else was interesting any swag any other speakers any from from a wow factor uh perspective so I got lots

of Impressions to share but you know from a wow factor kind of like this is really interesting yeah I Echo some of the stuff that that the three of you saw as well but one thing that stuck out to me is kind of back behind us a little bit there was Georgia Tech had a booth and um they had at the booth uh a large xylophone and a piano and a drum kit and the xylophone was interesting because it had a couple of robotic arms with mallets and it had kind of like a V shaped kind of Boom behind it with u a little face

on it with eyebrows and stuff and the boom could move around and swivel and look at you and do things and the eyebrows could go up and down and the you know the the mallets um on the robot hands could play the xylophone now you know that's interesting you've got a robot playing a xylophone that's kind of cool but I think that um what maybe a lot of people missed as they walked by the booth I I kind of stop and talk to them for a few minutes is that there was no pre-programmed music at all that the robot was playing instead the uh accompanyment

from the the piano and from the drum kit the the robot would listen to that and then would improvise so it was a it was inference it would improvise in real time um along with the music as they played so I thought that was pretty slick and pretty cool and it was it was kind of a neat detail that you know I think a lot of people who just walked by would be kind of like oh that's cute you know robot playing the xylophone but it was like yeah but there's no like it's also coming up with the music which was pretty neat and she

I say she because it had a female voice also sang I did not catch it singing I heard from from our booth you could hear that singing sometimes but I did not was it like ABBA Dancing Queen kind of there was many different songs yeah I don't know why but I kept hearing maybe it was in my head but I kept hearing dancing queen and I was like why is there so much Abba totally that's just all the time for me oh that's awesome yeah okay so I think behind the scenes there is a picture of um Forest so one of our guys with the

mountain but that link does not work for me Jess so you're going to have to give me a different link that just goes to I don't know something not any picture um cool so was there anything else uh Brian or Jonathan about uh just kind of like fun fun moments that you want to talk about so a personal one for me which I may have told the story last year after uh SC then um a friend of mine and I have a a standing dat to meet up at at C or ciq at SC and play Mario Kart on our DS so my first SC

ever I won a DS at one of the the giveaways and then he and I and some friends at argon where we used to work together uh would uh play that at play Mario Kart at lunch and so he happens to be a customer of ours now so we're we're in pretty close contact all the time but we we had made our our standing appointment and and met back in the vendor area to play some Mario Kart so I was glad to get that in that is awesome okay I'm have to ask you for some tips on that I'm new to Mario Kart my son

uh which I know is an amazingly crazy thing to say but my son just recently bought a switch and so we have Mario Kart in the house now and I I don't know how to play it and I understand that that that's a little bit uh frivolous on its face but to me the reason that actually is a nice anecdote here is to me SC is all about the relationships with the people that we've had and uh you you know this guy goes all the way back to my first real professional job and it's it's really great to to get to meet up with the

people at the show that we've known for a long time so you know those like little carts that you're driving in the Mario Kart those little whatever they're called carts I Gokarts go-kart I did one down a Giant Mountain when I went to when I took my son to New Zealand last year like a live one it was the scar thing I was like I'm not doing it I'm not doing it we drove up this mountain it's like a in the winter time it's a ski mountain you know where there so they have like this the slopes and everything but in the summertime they have

like you could bring your bike and you can mountain bike around on the same Trails or you can do these little go-karts it was crazy it was so fast I was like this is so much fun it was the funnest thing I ever did so I highly recommend doing it in person as well so we do have a a picture here can you can you guys do yes so this is our forest dear forest and he is shaking hands with the mountain that is so fun and Forest is not a small guy you know he's this uh this this photograph is it makes him look

a little bit minuscule he is not a small person oh that is so fun I love pictures Okay so let's see let's stop sharing that one um we I think we actually have like a little a montage or some a video of things maybe that can help spark um some of our conversation here so let me go back and just share I think I think it's this one I think maybe we could share this let me know guys if this uh if you can see it here yes okay press play r r that was so much fun I totally forgot about all the people

people that had their their Red Hat fedoras on with the little rocky sticker yeah that was great pin that was fun one thing I did forget to mention is you know we we like to take a stop over at the student cluster competition and increasingly kind of year-over-year we're seeing more pickup by by Rocky Linux which isn't surprising Centos would have been a really popular choice there before so it makes sense that most of them and I think all but two of them this year would be running Rocky Linux but uh I was also excited this year to see that at least one site um

was also running Warewulf which was really cool and I wish that we had known about it before because they had run into a number of issues where if they had gotten plugged into the community we could have helped them out quite a lot and and so I I went and introduced myself and the the guy that was leading that team like had an immediate laundry list of questions uh for for why they were having certain problems and yeah so uh I've reached out to him and reached out to the professor that SP sponsoring that team and found out not only are they likely to do

it again next year so I'm hoping that we can keep in contact for that but it sounds like and it's at the University of New Mexico if I let me check my notes real quick well I'll confirm here in a minute um but they they teach in HPC class that's based on a number of of ciq products including Rocky Linux and and Apptainer I think and and Warewulf so uh it's my hope that we can keep in touch and maybe support them a bit in the community yeah that's wonderful thank you actually for for mentioning and reminding all of us um it's it's interesting to

me that not everyone I mean I guess it makes sense right like sometimes you're not really sure where to go for help and support and specifically for Warewulf the community is the the strongest you to get the best most immediate support in the slack in the slack channel so we'll have Jess um post a link to to join the slack channel for Warewulf if that is of interest to you and people are finding it I noticed that 19 more people joined the slack immediately after SC so that's also cool to see that is very cool yes good job yeah it's very exciting what's happening in

the the Warewulf world and uh what's even cooler is that you've been kind of preparing for this for the last year right like really kind of ramping up making a lot of changes doing a lot of things you know to the the code and the functionality to begin with so it's really fun to see it picking up the way that it is yeah and it's it's a good time to be in the Warewulf Community for sure there's a lot of kind of Confluence of things happening um that are are driving interest in the project and we're getting a lot of new contributors too I don't

have the statistics in front of me one one of the things we did in the booth was a little impromptu where not quite impromptu but unofficial Warewulf bof um birds of a feather session and you know we gave an update on how things have been going over the last year which has included a lot of formalization but also included um several new firsttime contributors uh which I'm really excited to see including large functionality that's been um contributed and and supported by um by a guy at University of Arizona who's been working with the project a lot so again we appreciate all those Community contributors yeah

absolutely yeah that was really awesome and I'm also noticing your scarf so thank you I had to go and get it you know to to display all of my pins yeah yeah that's super fun yeah thanks for sharing that and thank you J for making them for all of us as well it was cool to have that kind of be our our one thing that kind of you know connected all of us that were working at the booth was this wonderful scarf that we all had so that was really cool okay so yes Mr God love what came up for you from from watching that

video what else would you like to share I mean from watching the video I just saw the street fighter cabinet again and it was just so much fun to watch everybody especially Greg and how much joy he got in particular out of playing Street Fighter such a great idea um more you know more to uh kind of like professional stuff um you know not the street fighters not professional but you know whatever um really I think this was the this was the year of fuzzball at SC sure um you know to be to be totally candid I mean our company uh started off um really

based on fuzzball uh you know more or less and then we've kind of sh shifted focus a little bit because of you know an opportunity to create a new operating system and promote it in the community which has been a tremendous opportunity but it's time now we're shifting Focus back yeah and so I think that we were really promoting fuzzball quite a bit and that was one of the reasons it was the year of fuzzball but it was also like not only were we promoting it we had a lot of people who were coming and asking questions about fuzzball there was a lot more um

recognition by folks as that I saw as far as what is what is fuzzball what you know and what it can do and more questions about its functionality and stuff like that so I thought it was really you know kind of the year of fuzzball absolutely you want one other thing oh go ahead RZ oh yeah I just wanted you to kind of explain to people what fuzzball is yeah of course I mean you know there's a lot of different ways to explain it and I the way that I like to explain it especially within an HPC focused um audience like you know we had

obviously at SC and that we you know might have a little bit in this webinar but the way I was explaining it there is that all right it's a story if you go back 10 years um bunch of us were HPC admins and we were getting requests from users to install Docker and we kind of know how that story went like we looked at it and said ah well it's not really doesn't have the security model for a multi-tenant system and it's also kind of like just not designed to run jobs and so Greg kind of formed a community around the project Singularity which became

Apptainer and that project was you know if we could build for you a container platform that was you know based on HPC kind of ideals and HPC mindset what would it look like and you know at the time um there were a lot of folks who were like you shouldn't do that you shouldn't reinvent the wheel you shouldn't you know you should use Docker you should just make it work in HPC you should you know but I think that we've seen that this is like this has been an extraordinary successful project it's helped a lot of people and it was the right thing to do

now guess what we're in exactly the same position uh everybody's coming and saying hey we want to start using kubernetes with an HPC and admins are scratching their heads and looking at it and trying to figure out how to like kind of force it to run jobs and try to you know make it work and there's some success with doing that but some of us are saying okay if we had a container orchestration platform which was specific for HPC for running jobs what would that look like and we're doing that again and it's kind of it's It's history repeating itself because some folks are saying

you shouldn't do that you should use kubernetes you should use the existing tool that's already there you should make it work in HBC well we've seen the success already of purpose building a tool for containers for HPC and I I think we're going to see it again so that's that's the story of fuzzball to me to me it's it's container orchestration based on jobs instead of microservices and from an HPC perspective and that's really what it is in a nutshell well said that is going to be a short right there clip that boom well it's not that short but yeah okay well shorter than long

short long awesome uh so Brian is there anything about what what J just said that you would like to add to or kind of talk about because I know you you are in there you're working on fuzzball now so talk to us about it uh uh I guess expanding on Dave's thread uh I think just the experience of explaining fuzzball to people that passed by the booth and I think what was most memorable for me were those kind of aha moments where you know the people we're talking to are like this will solve the exact problem I'm having and this is the exact tool

for the users that I'm supporting and it would basically solve a lot of my problems which I thought was you know very memorable for me yeah was there any of those problems that you kind of remember and would like to share uh I think it's uh I guess from what I remember it's basically people supporting uh users which were I guess predominantly gooey users they didn't really like using the command line and of course fuzzball does have a web web interface where you can create workflows submit your jobs monitor them and um yeah and it seemed like the perfect solution uh for that particular person

supporting these users yeah perfect thank you one of the many things that fuzzball can do so appreciate that Jonathan is there anything that you want to expand on and that thought so for me I'm I'm mostly just thinking of how my experience with ciq at SC has changed from year to year it was like the first time people didn't know what ciq was at all and we were introducing ourselves and then people knew who ciq was and they were mostly they knew what Rocky Linux was and they were finding us through that um but they hadn't heard of fuzzball that kind of needed to be

introduced to the concept in the first place this year my experience was more like people not only knew ciq knew fuzzball but knew the problem they wanted to solve and that fuzzball was the solution for it and the the excitement around the product and the project for that and to see oh we were right there is in fact this uh this Gap in the market and uh I'm just excited to get it in more people's hands you know we haven't talked about Federate much maybe at all yet in this webinar um but I think that's really where the the the capabilities of the platform are

really going to light up for people where now they they have the ability to write their workflow and run it anywhere that they can run fuzzball instead of just in single deployments like we've been able to up to now um and and being able to show that off the show and and see people's reaction to it was was great yeah that was exciting do you want to expand a little bit more on the like well AI right of course everyone like the AI explosion has begun right I don't see it you know tapping out anytime soon so how does fuzzball H help um Ai workflows

and I'm an old guard HPC person so I've got my you know old man yells at Cloud face on saying AI is just more HPC yeah uh but where it really does is this ability to run anywhere and you know a lot of the a lot of the AI researcher space has been in the cloud and hasn't had access to some of the tooling that's been available in traditional HBC but then the same is true from the other end that HBC people haven't had access to the the capacity and the capabilities that have been available out in the cloud and so it's our goal with

fuzzball to let people run their workloads wherever they want to run them and bring their AI workloads inhouse or scale them out into a cloud uh Computing resource um so yeah there there there's a lot of exciting possibilities there but not in a specific to AI sense it's a general solution that by being General solves some of these scalability and and uh and work scheduling issues that people have with AI as well yeah I mean on the the AI front too the other thing so we've talked not at uh I didn't talk at SC but at um in other meetings and things talked to you

know some AI researchers who have said that you know when they train models um you know they don't they're not writing code a lot of times they're not um you know uh worrying about what ports are open to be able to you know attach to a jupyter notebook or some other visualization tool or whatever the companies that they work for have Frameworks that they've put together where they it's just like an assembly line IM where they can take a new model and just drop it in and say train this thing and then they can watch it with their dashboards in real time as the weights

change and they can kind of see how it's progressing and maybe interrupt it as it's going and change a few things around and tweak it they don't have to wait you know until the model gets completely done I would say you know fuzzball is not a strictly an AI solution and so we don't have that kind of capability but what we are doing is providing a tool set to make it very very easy to build that kind of capability with fuzzball so it's you know it's a it's halfway there as far as you know taking the SSH out of the equation and taking the the

terminal and just allowing people to just interact and you know there's a lot of facilities there to be able for you know um companies to quickly and easily be able to build uh the kinds of visualization the kinds of interactive um you know things that are that are needed that you know people need for uh AI I I was kind of surprised to find out in some of the meetings that we've had with AI folks that in some ways are a lot less technical the HPC folks right they they are totally embracing the guey totally want you know the to just uh kind of you

know drag and drop and press buttons and do things like that um so it's it's once again it's just Val validation that we're moving in the right direction with us I like it one more thing on AI that I would say like so this was kind of surprising to me and I guess it goes back a little bit to Jonathan's Old Guard you know yelling at the cloud kind of thing um the last I hadn't even noticed the pun yet in old man yells at Cloud uh there but so um the last the last uh two conferences that I've attended H have been before SC

have been um an HPC users group argon National Lab and um HPC on Wall Street in Manhattan and both of those conferences uh explicitly change their titles and their focus to you know in one case to uh include Ai and in another case to actually make the entire conference about AI so the HBC users group basically shifted its entire Focus to Ai and so I was really I was like interested to see you know here we are at SC uh how much of SC is going to be dominated by AI now and I was kind of surprised actually it was the opposite of what my

impression was um you know we saw and I mentioned like the Georgia Tech demonstration we we saw some booths and demonstrations and things that explicitly were talking about AI but it wasn't on the tip of everybody's tongue yet it was not like everywhere it was it didn't dominate the conference the way I thought it was going to and so that you know it's actually a little concerning to me because it's kind of like you know this is uh This Is The Cutting Edge stuff and this is the direction in which you know we're converging toward as far as AI research and HPC and I'm worried

that maybe some of the more traditional HPC folks are maybe kind of missing that you know it's been going on for a while now Dave you say it hasn't done that yet um and I wonder if it's that it has been that way in a previous year and it's kind of melding out into just another special case of HBC it is that a possibility or do you think it really is a that it hasn't caught up yet uh position that's a good that's a good question that's a good perspective I feel like it has been that way before four where it felt like it was

Big Data one year and then it was AI for a while but I I I'm not the best historian so it might just be my individual impression it could be you know I don't I don't remember going to an sc and really feeling like this is you know this is being dominated by AI by AI now but I you know it might just be something I don't remember yeah h well it does seem to be almost everywhere so I guess there's still a lot of use cases and a lot of things to do that really have nothing to do with AI which kind of makes

sense I mean you know if people are still running Centos 5 or six or seven they might not be able to run uh anything related to AI on their in their environment so I am going back in time through old SC websites you can go to like sc21 supercomputing org sc22 and looking at because there there's usually like a tagline for each year and so like uh sc22 is HPC matters and sc23 is I am HPC so maybe the ACM is is trying to be a bull workk of traditional HPC for this conference against an AI encroachment uh and I just hadn't noticed that or

considered it before I'll have to think about that and and look at that a bit more I mean it's all the same really so I feel like that's a you know if if that's if that's the intention I don't know yeah well I think at ciq we we have kind of coined the term I think we have forgive me if I am wrong and it was somebody else but the performance intensive Computing really kind of bringing the Two Worlds together in my mind I certainly hear that from us more than I hear it from others at this point right you heard it here first you

heard it here first right as that's everything everywhere all at once yeah pic I like it um okay so next on my list of things to talk about um we can go back to fuzzball of course if you would like to but is this uh the birds of a feather you would kind of mention that Jonathan was there something you wanted to yeah I went to two uh I went to the high performance software foundation bof so the hpsf is an umbrella well foundation I guess within the Linux Foundation um that is trying to tie together a bunch of basically it's kind of a follow

on an unofficial follow on from the exoscale project where a bunch of software was created in support of exoscale computing um but needs a home as funding sources for the exoscale project has wound down and so they're they're trying to make sure that those those software tools that were built up for HPC and for exos scales HPC aren't abandoned and have support and and long-term development and that's applicable to us because one of the software projects in the hpsf is Apptainer which was already a Linux Foundation project so um interested in the the continuing maturity of that group and how it might help you know

further use of Apptainer and maturity in the Apptainer project but then there's also a question of whether the Warewulf project would be um would be applicable for this group because most of the other software is is like specific scientific software like it's something an end user would use and there's not much infrastructure software in there yet so we're having an ongoing conversation there and then the other was the I went to the open HPC bof and uh again open HPC is aopo to us because they they've recently released their I think open HPC 3.2 includes where will for as a primary recommended deployment mechanism for

an open HPC style cluster which is really exciting for us and so we want to make sure that we're supporting that project as well as the Warewulf project itself um but to just be part of that user Community here the the problems the the solutions that Warewulf have been for them as it's you know a relatively new part of the open HPC ecosystem the the version four of Warewulf is version three has been part of open h HBC for years um but yeah lots of support from them open HBC also gave a talk at the ciq booth and frankly like half of it was just

Warewulf 4 information which was cool was cool but yeah lot lots of Apptainer lots of Rocky Linux and and of course Warewulf in the open HBC community and hoping to be increasingly a part of it awesome Brian did you have any birds of a feather um stories um no no I was around for the Warewulf and naer one around our booth but uh no I wasn't able to attend any uh outside of our booth yeah was there anything about the ones that were in our booth that you want to highlight uh no nothing of not at the moment uh Dave is there anything from the

Apptainer one that that you'd like to highlight uh the Apptainer one honestly um you know I don't think we did a a super bang up job promoting it ahead of time and so because of that I think a lot of people were kind of like wait there's a there's a VA going on um that's probably you know that's got a lot to do with me like my bad I should have done more but it was cool because we ended up with you know kind of a a small intimate Gathering of people and you know it was it was fun to just kind of like sit

down in a little huddle and talk to folks everything from you know folks who were kind of beginners and were like what is this Apptainer thing and kind of you know wanted to know a little bit about it um to folks who were having really specific problems and so it was a nice time to just kind of sit down and really connect with uh some new users and some longtime users who had some it was almost like um you know doing slack in real life or something it was nice it turn it turned out turned out well that's awesome yeah I think both the Warewulf

and the oper communities have monthly meetings right I think um is it Warewulf that's every other week actually and then Apptainer that's once a month so twice a month for Warewulf um I think it's the 1 and third Wednesday um twice a month also for Apptainer so it's h Tuesdays first and probably first and third Tuesdays okay yeah awesome yeah those are great break great places to kind of pop in and see what's going on and stay up to date with what's happening and then of course if you have um what do you call it like a suggestion right of what you would like to

see happen uh in the the project that's a a great place the the community and then um Apptainer is also on slack yeah that Apptainer has a pretty active slack Community as well very active yeah those Community meetings are are awesome they're usually you know kind of a a smaller group of core developers and um what we usually typically go over in the meetings we'll do we'll talk about the Milestone you know for the next release or the milestone for the next releases what pieces of work are in there to go into the next releases and then we'll bring up specific issues that have been

raised on GitHub that might need further discussion and kind of get an get a plan together for action and then also if there's any folks who uh are kind of new to those meetings you know we'll have time to ask them um are you just kind of here to chill out and watch do you is there something specific you wanted to talk about so yeah it is a great place to bring you know bring ideas and stuff like that it um it's kind of a more it's not like a 10,000 view it's a little bit more like right on top of some specific things so

it might take a couple meetings and kind of reviewing things on GitHub to kind of get up to speed and kind of you know get into that mode but yeah it's it's a great place um to to get plugged in for sure it's also a really good place especially in Apptainer to get assigned work to do on Apptainer which can be intimidating but if you have any interest in getting involved in an open source community Dave is like this is Dave dyra Dr Dave is is very eager to get people to do work in the project and my I think my first ever contribution to

an open source project was by asking for a bug to be fixed in Apptainer and then the issue became assigned to me careful what you wish for yeah exactly yeah but there's support in the community if you if you are in any way willing and interested to do that it's a good way to to find motivation for it yeah that's wonderful thank you and then of course CQ as a company we do provide you know the Professional Services the support the you know whatever you need kind of on top of that um and training as well for Apptainer or Warewulf that's something that you want

to get into your um your environment okay wonderful um let's see is there any questions in the chats all around this would be a good time to kind of let us know and pop them up we would love to answer any questions so if questions are kind of in your mind rolling around you just pop them into the comments and we will bring them up Arthur tide what's up man does the team think the massive hugeness of sc24 was due to AI inflow of money into the space it it didn't seem that much huge Huger didn't seem that that bigger than other sc's I've been

to it just seems bigger than more recent sc's like post pandemic sc's so it has felt like it's been coming back and I'm sure you know money is money I'm sure some of that money is from an influx from AI but uh it seems like it's a relatively normal uh conference in it in the line of SC conferences um yeah I you know so I have got some several Impressions on that number one the space the shape of the space was different and so because of that it was like a long thin Corridor and instead of like being a big square and so because that

you could Walk and Walk and Walk and Walk you know before getting to the booth so it seemed really huge from that perspective because of that um you know you know there was a lot of people there I will say to though to that point one of our neighbors um was selling Transformers and like just you know just straight up power and so you might be kind of like what are they doing at SC well what they're doing at SC is you know if you're kind of keeping an eye on the AI community and you're watching the news and stuff like that you're seeing right

now that a lot of the private Labs like Google and Microsoft Etc are getting really interested in having small nuclear reactors because they need power so bad and so yeah so there was this company that was serving Transformers and it was actually you know had a couple of a big um speakers and some dance music going which was so welcome so that it was not silent at our booth it was so awesome and they also what else was welcome is they had one of their big transformers was actually like a big beer cake and they were serving beer uh pretty much all day which was

they were they were having a good time any who I kind of heard that um really they just needed to get like a single order I mean this is like a rumor but I I heard that they really they just needed to get like a single order to make it worthwhile for their presents to be be there and like the first day they had like four leads or something like that so they were just there celebrating and that I mean that's a direct that's directly linked to AI right yeah yeah yeah no nothing is more power hungry than a room full of gpus right now

for sure you know I spoke to them as well and I was I was also very surprised like Transformers I'm like what I actually said what are you guys doing here and then they told me that whole same story that you said Transformer the other yeah but man at least it's Ai and not crypto I I just got to say oh that's funny that's fun okay well we definitely had a wonderful time I'm very much looking forward to next year is going to be in St Louis St Louis yeah is that right yeah do we already have like a tagline for that one SC c25

oh I don't know I expect not does it exist I'm sure everyone's getting there trying to get their rooms now that happens so quickly oh HPC ignites we do have it okay goes along with the you know the barbecue history of St Louis right there you go I like it that's awesome right we're have the booth next year then Dave with the barbecue oh yeah i' be smoking some ribs if we could get some sort of like uh you know exhaust system going I'd be happy to I don't want to smoke up the whole conference though smoke up the whole conference that would be fun

all right so what are the takeaways let's let's let's go around and do some um some takeaways from the conference and then of course kind of like our our our presence there Jonathan you want to start I for me it's kind of the same that it always is the the the contacts with the community and the people that are using the software and the people that are doing the work is always great and you know I I was excited to see more and more of what we're doing be an integral part of what's going on out there whether it's Rocky Linux is just everywhere or

more and more people using Apptainer or more more people using Warewulf or the excitement that we're seeing around fuzzball and uh how it it very clearly has a a use case that you know we're we're excited to launch it into yeah well said it was a very very good time for all of us Dave you have a wrap up yeah I mean similar to what Jonathan said a lot of validation that were in the right place at the right time um you know like I said I think it was really the year of fuzzball um you know and that that that really uh was first

on everybody's mind and you know it it it um you know it just it it it is very validating to hear people you like enunciating exactly the kinds of problems that you're trying to solve and then be like that is this product you know uh and so it was really wonderful to get that to get that um validation and get that uh Insight that yep we're we're doing exactly what we need to be doing and to get like also feedback from users as far as like this is what we really need and you know this is the direction that we want you to go so

yep I think it was totally the year of fuzzball yeah absolutely it was actually kind of funny some people would come by because of course there's still people that don't really aren't familiar with everything that we do or who who we are as CQ and our relationship with a different open source you know projects and that kind of stuff and sometimes people would come by and you know ask them about you know their environment what they're doing and what their job is and some of the struggles that they're having it's like oh yeah you know this will solve that problem and another oh and this

oh and this and it kind of seems ridiculous right like what do you One-Stop shop like you're just GNA solve all of my problems like well kinda I mean at an HPC confence you bet yes exactly we do so yeah that was fun Brian you got some wrap-ups you actually did some fuzzball Federate demonstrations at the conference didn't you yes yes uh so yeah like similar to what Dave said this was the year of fuzzball uh we were able to demonstrate fuzzball Federate which basically combines two different orchestrate uh fuzzball orchestrate clusters together you're able to submit to a single interface and Target specific storage

classes on each cluster or if you're not targeting any specific storage uh you're able to First saturate your entire on Prem uh compute resources and then burst your workflow into the cloud uh which was really cool uh but yeah yeah it was great to show that off to uh everyone that came to that or demos yeah that was really exciting and in fact we're going to be having those because we recorded them so we're just doing you know a couple little editing stuff so that the audio and the visual and everything kind of goes together nicely so look out for those we definitely will be

posting them on YouTube and I'm I'm sure on LinkedIn we'll kind of um you know po post some of those videos as well and then if fuzzball is something that you guys are interested and you want to talk to us more about um we're going to be doing some yeah absolutely definitely come talk to us so go to ciq.com uh and you can fill out any form in there and it will come to me you can also email us info@ciq.com

that will also come to me and I'll make sure to to get you in touch with the right people we're going to be doing some um yeah some some beta testing because it's already in the hands of uh a few of our customers and of course we want to broaden that a little bit so that we can get down into the details of of what you need so if you want to be part of that we would love for you to be a part of that so definitely contact us Al righty well I think that is it for today you guys thank you so

much for your time and everything that you're doing behind the scenes and then just how wonderful it is as you kind of take what you're working on you know at home because we are fully remote which is wonderful part of our company and bringing it out into um the public and having the conversations and helping people do what they need to do appreciate it have a great day guys thanks Rose thanks Rose thanks everybody see next time bye