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	t005-energy-efficient-programming.txt (3506B)
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	1 I presented my thougts on scientific software development at [1]brcon
	2 2020. Full abstract:
	3
	4 Numerical models are used extensively for simulating complex
	5 physical systems including fluid flows, astronomical events,
	6 weather, and climate. Many researchers struggle to bring their
	7 model developments from single-computer, interpreted languages to
	8 parallel high-performance computing (HPC) systems. There are
	9 initiatives to make interpreted languages such as MATLAB, Python,
	10 and Julia feasible for HPC programming. In this talk I argue that
	11 the computational overhead is far costlier than any potential
	12 development time saved. Instead, doing model development in C and
	13 unix tools from the start minimizes porting headaches between
	14 platforms, reduces energy use on all systems, and ensures
	15 reproducibility of results.
	16
	17 You can check out the slides and audio here:
	18
	19 - [2]slides (markdown)
	20 - [3]audio (ogg)
	21 - [4]slides+audio as video
	22
	23 The full conference schedule and presentation recordings are available
	24 [5]here.
	25
	26 Brcon is the annual meeting of [6]bitreich, an initiative to promote
	27 minimal and perfect programming and system design practice. In a
	28 nutshell, the philosophy favors simple and well-designed solutions
	29 (e.g. C, POSIX, Unix) over convoluted and hyped software-development
	30 tools (cloud deployment, docker, systemd, autotools, and so on).
	31 The bitreich information site uses the WWW-precursor protocol
	32 [7]gopher, demonstrating that information transfer can occur without
	33 the ugly mess of the modern web that is html, javascript, cookies,
	34 and trackers. The conference was held virtually, but the minimal
	35 and open standards used for conference participation is a perfect
	36 example of the bitreich philosophy.
	37
	38 The presentations were displayed by [8]catpoint(1) which takes text
	39 files and shows the content as slides in the terminal. The audio
	40 stream was publically broadcast via [9]icecast. Each presenter
	41 would stream their mic to the icecast server, for example via
	42 [10]ffmpeg(1):
	43
	44 ffmpeg -loglevel debug -f sndio -ac 2 -ar 44100 -i snd/0 \
	45 -codec libmp3lame -f mp3 \
	46 icecast://source:${pass}@bitreich.org:3232/live
	47
	48 The listeners would point a network audio client to this URL and
	49 hear the speaker in real time. For the slides, the viewers connected
	50 via ssh(1) to a public guest account, automatically attached to a
	51 multiplexed terminal session controlled by the presenter, and watched
	52 the presentation in their own terminal with minimal bandwith
	53 requirements. Questions were communicated via irc.
	54
	55 The source code for my presentation is available [11]here. The
	56 [12]pointtools utility md2point(1) is useful for generating catpoint
	57 presentations, as it reads presentations in markdown format, does
	58 some light styling, and outputs catpoint-compatible text files.
	59
	60 It doesn't get more minimal, efficient, and perfect than that!
	61
	62
	63 References:
	64
	65 [1] gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2020
	66 [2] gopher://adamsgaard.dk/0/pub/energy-efficient-programming.md
	67 [3] gopher://adamsgaard.dk/9/pub/brcon2020-energy-efficient-programming-…
	68 [4] gopher://adamsgaard.dk/9/video/brcon2020-energy-efficient-programmin…
	69 [5] gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2020
	70 [6] gopher://bitreich.org
	71 [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
	72 [8] gopher://bitreich.org/1/scm/catpoint
	73 [9] https://icecast.org
	74 [10] https://ffmpeg.org
	75 [11] gopher://adamsgaard.dk/1/src/brcon2020_adc
	76 [12] gopher://bitreich.org/1/scm/pointtools