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t005-energy-efficient-programming.html (4119B)
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     1 
I presented my thougts on scientific software development during
     2 brcon 2020.  Full
     3 abstract:

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Numerical models are used extensively for simulating
     6 complex physical systems including fluid flows, astronomical events,
     7 weather, and climate.  Many researchers struggle to bring their
     8 model developments from single-computer, interpreted languages to
     9 parallel high-performance computing (HPC) systems.  There are
    10 initiatives to make interpreted languages such as MATLAB, Python,
    11 and Julia feasible for HPC programming.  In this talk I argue that
    12 the computational overhead is far costlier than any potential
    13 development time saved.  Instead, doing model development in C and
    14 unix tools from the start minimizes porting headaches between
    15 platforms, reduces energy use on all systems, and ensures reproducibility
    16 of results.

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You can check out the slides and audio here:

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Alternatively, you can watch slides+audio in this video:

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    27         
    34 

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    37 The full conference
    38 schedule and presentation recordings are available here.
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Brcon is the annual meeting of bitreich, an initiative to promote
    43 minimal and perfect programming and system design practice.  In a
    44 nutshell, the philosophy favors simple and well-designed solutions
    45 (e.g. C, POSIX, Unix) over convoluted and hyped software-development
    46 tools (cloud deployment, docker, systemd, autotools, and so on).
    47 The bitreich information site uses the WWW-precursor protocol gopher,
    49 demonstrating that information transfer can occur without the ugly
    50 mess of the modern web that is html, javascript, cookies, and
    51 trackers.  The conference was held virtually, but the minimal and
    52 open standards used for conference participation is a perfect example
    53 of the bitreich philosophy.

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The presentations were displayed by catpoint(1) which
    57 takes text files and shows the content as slides in the terminal.
    58 The audio stream was publically broadcast via icecast.  Each presenter would stream
    60 their mic to the icecast server, for example via ffmpeg(1):

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ffmpeg -loglevel debug -f sndio -ac 2 -ar 44100 -i snd/0 \
    64     -codec libmp3lame -f mp3 \
    65     icecast://source:${pass}@bitreich.org:3232/live
    66 

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The listeners would point a network audio client to this URL and
    69 hear the speaker in real time.  For the slides, the viewers connected
    70 via ssh(1) to a public guest account, automatically attached to a
    71 multiplexed terminal session controlled by the presenter, and watched
    72 the presentation in their own terminal with minimal bandwith
    73 requirements.  Questions were communicated via irc.

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The source code for my presentation is available here.
    77 The pointtools
    78 utility md2point(1) is useful for generating catpoint presentations,
    79 as it reads presentations in markdown format, does some light
    80 styling, and outputs catpoint-compatible text files.

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It doesn't get more minimal, efficient, and perfect than that!