Lab Tales 2023

I'm so glad I attended the Lab Tales workshop at Princeton this past week! Thank you to the organizers, Daniel Cohen, Annetta Black and the Council on Science and Technology at Princeton.

This was the first time they opened it up to external attendees and luckily, Prof. Tom Zajdel sent out an email about it.

Before I get to gushing about the workshop, I want to talk about how it was the perfect atmosphere to visit Princeton. The Oppenheimer movie had just come out, I hadn't seen it yet, and roaming around the Princeton campus was like priming myself for "easter eggs" in the movie. The workshop also used Oppenheimer as a backdrop for some of its motivation.

I don't want to spoil what the workshop is like for future attendees, so this post is just to document some of the work that came out of attending.

An accessible description of what I work on

Simple writer wouldn't let me write jargon like 'program', or 'multiple', or 'cooking', so this was a little difficult. But I think the exercise was useful to distill the work to the fundamentals. Personally, it made the process of writing less daunting.

Without any restrictions here's what I work on in simple language:

High-performance computing is often gate-kept as an "art" that you have to be a natural at. But I strongly believe that it is a craft to be honed. There are certain techniques that you have in your arsenal, and you apply them as appropriate. My work is to identify general techniques and describe recipes for their application.