We have an awesome trio of talks on tap this month! Laser artist Mike Gould gives us the skinny on building amazing light displays (with demos!), tech wizard Dave Strenski takes us on a historical tour of uber-powered computers, and urban planner Margi Dewar talks about the future of Detroit. You don’t want to miss it! So grab a friend, grab a beer, and cool your heels at Nerd Nite Ann Arbor!
Runs with Lasers – Mike Gould
Local laser artist Mike Gould discusses his recent experiences with the Illuminatus Lasers Troupe, including:
Mike has also done lasers for the UM Stadium half-time show during a night game. (Notre Dame, we won). He’s go an upcoming entry into the Ann Arbor Art Center’s tech+art exhibit, and has made appearances at various Maker Faires, Art Prize, Ignite, FoolMoon, etc.
Calculating 10^18 Results per Second – Dave Strenski
The world of high performance computing is changing. This presentation will run through a short history of computing highlighting the different types of computations used in computing’s past, including vectorization, parallelization, accelerators, and reconfigurable computing. From this historical perspective, the discussion will lead to what’s needed for the future to reach exa-scale (10^18 floating point operation per second) computing. It will also cover the types of applications that need exa-scale computing and the merging of high performance computing and data analytics. More deets: www.Cray.com and www.SolarYpsi.org.
Detroit: Planning a City After Abandonment – Margi Dewar
Urban planning as a field focuses on managing development to shape the effects of growth on cities. But what can planners do in cities like Detroit where developing, redeveloping, rebuilding, and revitalizing are not possibilities? I will lay out directions with a few examples for a different kind of urban planning.