Awesome IT: Fast and Limitless

Written by Marcel Sondaar

Last Friday April 10th this year’s instance of Awesome IT, a one-day technical conference, was held in Amsterdam. It covered both academic and industrial state-of-the-art talks, often covering radical alternatives to current systems.

Conference

The talks were quite varied. First off was a presentation on quantum computers, and how they operate. The presentation included a live demonstration of the principle using a random number generator, although it wasn’t exactly representative of a real quantum computer. Subsequently there was a talk on how performance was related to programming languages, and how they should be fundamentally changed to allow greater parallelism, including compiling the same programs for normal processors and GPUs.

The second half of the conference was provided by industry members, starting off with a very interesting talk on the Mill: a new CPU architecture in development that demonstrates the capability to solve several performance and security barriers that are irrevocably present in all the processors we use in daily life.

The final talk covered the result of when Nokia ditched it’s Symbian workforce. This eventually resulted in an alternative mobile platform called Jolla that’s currently shipping — and running Android apps.

After-party

After the conference, I had the lucky opportunity to join the Mill staff and several other interested people for dinner, where we discussed various technical (and completely unrelated) subjects in more detail. In all, this ended up a very interesting and entertaining day.

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Originally published at www.elements.nl on April 13, 2015.