CIUK 2025 is now upon us, beginning with day-zero tomorrow. I cannot remember exactly when I first went to the Machine Evaluation Workshop (MEW), as this High Performance Computing event was formerly known from 1990 to 2015, but I know I was there when the name changed. Although I cannot remember when, I clearly remember the first time I walked out of Liverpool Lime Street Station, up the hill to meet my colleague at the venue at the time, the Adelphi Hotel, whose sign you can see from the door of the station.

Changing names of GPFS (to Spectrum Scale) and MEW (to CIUK) in 2015

This will be my first time attending as part of the contingent of a vendor, my new employer OCF Limited, exhibiting at the conference. I am organising, or helping organise, several events; the OCF Steel Stack User Forum, OCF Steel Stack is OCF’s HPC management platform which I now lead the development of, and the final on-site challenge for this year’s Student Cluster Challenge which OCF, and specifically my Research and Development team, are setting. The students will undertake our challenge on Friday morning, before the winning team is crowned in the afternoon - not giving us a huge window for marking but I do tend to perform well under pressure so I am not too worried.

Amongst these students is, I hope, the potential next generation of HPC experts and it is a privilege to have a role in trying to inspire them to consider working in this fascinating area of technology. I am immensely proud of my team and the hard work that has gone into OCF Steel Stack and the challenge this year, and I hope that seeing it come to fruition in the next few days is rewarding for them as well. Finally, I am looking forward to seeing friends, old and new, again this year in a community I have been part of for most of my career, now.

Laurence Hurst - Research and Development Lead banner

I am also getting very anxious in the run-up to travelling to this event. In September, I went to and spoke at The 3rd IBM Fusion EMEA User Group in Amsterdam (with a very unflattering picture taken of me in full flow being shared by the hosts) and I had been intending to write a blog post about that experience. Public speaking I’m generally good at - by the time I have to speak I will have it well scripted and rehearsed and the speaking itself I think went well. I tried to “ad-lib” some additional content I wrote during the earlier talks (which is why I’m holding a digital notebook in the picture, with those additional lines) but I ended up just sticking to my original script.

me in full flow at the IBM Fusion EMEA User Group meeting

That trip to Amsterdam was my first time flying since I was diagnosed with autism in January (which upset me greatly, I am still struggling with it which is why I have not written a post about that diagnosis or followed up the post about my ADHD diagnosis as I promised). It was also my first time ever travelling internationally on my own.

Knowing why I find certain things very difficult was helpful to managing my experience on that trip, however despite doing what I could to self-regulate it was extremely stressful and a couple of problems (related to travelling through Birmingham International Airport, navigating around on foot and travelling as a passenger on public transport, particular difficulties of mine) did push me beyond my coping ability. I survived, with my wife and boss remotely helping me, but I think this work trip I am finding particularly hard - despite a venue and event I have attended several times before - because it’s so soon, and the next one, after that experience.