Currently attending an Intel Developer Workshop at The Genome Analysis Centre in Norwich. Learning lots more about more advanced techniques for optimising code for speed. I already knew a fair bit about parallelization, vectorization and other such things but it’s nice to go into a bit more depth into the various aspects of performance tuning such as avoid cache misses and filling the various processing pipelines.

The Travelodge I am staying at isn’t exactly the nicest place on Earth, but I suppose it’ll do for a couple of nights. Hoping to be able to put more of the things I have learnt into practise when I am back at work, we should be getting licences for the Parallel Studio XE package so I can make use of Vtune and the various performance libraries to speed up the Simcyp Simulator.

Today I attended an Intel Developer Conference at the Mayfair hotel in London. The presentations covered various aspects of the Intel Parallel Studio XE software suite as well as informing people of the upcoming features of their new processors including the AVX-512 instruction set that will be similar to those in the Xeon Phi co-processors that are already available. These new instruction sets will be very useful for some of the number crunching that we do at Simcyp, just a shame they are a few years away from mainstream use really.

The best bit of the conference though was that they had a raffle at the end I won the main prize with was an Intel powered, Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro. Only had a quick look at it but it’s really light and looks to have lots of cool features such as being able to be a laptop or fold on itself to be a tablet. Definitely worth getting up at 5am to travel down to London for!

Also I found out there will be a developer workshop in a weeks time at the The Genome Analysis Centre in Norwich which hopefully I will be able to attend.