Another week, another load of paperwork written … another week that didn’t feel much like science except for the Intel bit which at least was interesting …

Pretty much the same topics as last week on my mind:

  • (Foresight) Last week I didn’t spend any time on “Foresight”, this week I did! This is the mid-term update to the European Network for Earth System Simulation (ENES) infrastructure strategy from 2012 (pdf). We held a meeting last year in October, and I’m coordinating the update, but it’s been on the back burner because of other commitments. However, we’re talking about it on Tuesday (i.e. in a couple of days), so I had to push on with it this week. I got a skeleton structure for a document done and discussed it with some colleagues.
  • (C3S Magic Lot2) I didn’t spend any time on this last week either, but this week spent a couple of hours on it in the context of our (CEDA) CP4CDS contract with ECMWF to supply ESGF data to the Copernicus Climate Services project (Lot 1). This activity deserves it’s own blog post and will get it when I come up for air … but meanwhile just to say that this week was about the interaction between Lot2 (where I have a UoR involvement) which is about providing code to run in the climate services system which will be delivered by Lot1, and Lot1 itself.
  • (Chasm) spent a couple of hours today preparing a summary presentation of the outputs from our chasm workshop also held in October last year, for tomorrow. This is about the future of how we programme climate models and their infrastructure. It’s not going to be easy!
  • (EPSRC Data Science Bid) A lot more time on that this week, impacts, objectives, updates to the outline, and some iterations around effort and finances.
  • (JASMIN Funding) Updated the brief for NERC with more details about the science programme consequences associated with the various financial and technical scenarios, and dealt with some of the consequential questions.

One new thing this week. Spent a day in Hamburg getting a restricted secret (!) briefing from Intel about their future plans. Very interesting stuff, none of which I can talk about, suffice to say I worry about programmability of next generation architectures (that’s no secret, I worry about how we programme current architectures such as KNL, and our entire Chasm activity is about this issue …). I think this is an oncoming train which much of the environmental science community is treating in the best traditions of ostrich escapism (collective heads in the sand).

As always on the Hamburg metro I notice how everyone seems just a bit more relaxed than the equivalent journey would be the UK. It might be just that there are less people in the carriage, but then I visit DKRZ and again people just seem less hassled, so it’s more than that. I get the impression that they still actually fund new things in Germany, rather than just ask people to carry on doing the old things and do new things with no new money; and as a consequence people have sensible workloads unlike here (he says at the end of a 63 hour working week). Things seem to get done, and maintained …

Of the other things I talked about last week, I progressed most of them in some small way as part of my normal email flow - I spent hours more on email this week …