SAO: Software Association of Oregon

SAO held an open house at their office in the US Bank building in downtown Portland this afternoon. As part of my expanding job search program I thought I would go by and see if I could manage to talk to some people, just for practice, ya know. As they were serving ice cream (and beer), my son volunteered to drive. He has his permit and needs the practice. I don't particularly care for driving, especially during rush hour, so this looked like a win-win situation to me.

Traffic was light until we got into the West Hills and then predictably it slowed to crawl which lasted all the way into downtown, where we continued to crawl from light to light. We did find a parking spot on the street just a block from the Bank building. There was a central meter half a block away which rejected my first credit card, took my second but failed to deliver a sticker. Back to the truck to get the loose change out of the loose change collector on the transmission hump. John and I scrape together a dollar and that gets us 48 minutes or so.



Over to the bank building and into the lobby. Now where is room 120? Doesn't appear to be right here, maybe it's one flight up. Down a short hall past opposing banks of elevators. Boy, there must be some crowd down here. It gets noisier as we get closer to the end. We come out in another lobby and there it is. From the noise you would think there was a hundred people there, but it looks more like 20 or 30. Granite floors and glass walls do nothing to muffle the sound.

Walk in, collect a bottle of ice cold water, make our way over to the ice cream. Talk to a very nice woman from MBank (formerly Merchant's Bank) dishing out the Cherry Garcia, which is white, not red as one might expect. M-Bank is one of the sponsor's of SAO. They are a local bank. I am beginning to fill in the picture a little bit.

I wander out into the crowd and meet Tim who has a PGI logo on his shirt. He is a salesman for a division of STMicroelectronics that makes compilers for HPC (High Performance Computing). Now this is more like it. HPC machines use multiple x86 processors to attack computing problems with brute force. Some machines have thousands of processors. One of the applications for this kind of computational horsepower is microelectronic chip layout. Synopsis, Cadence and Mentor are all playing this game, though Cadence is trying to buy Mentor. The oil companies are the big customers these days, with the price of oil what it is they have money to burn (ha, ha, I made a funny).

Lot's of companies are building HPC's. I think they may be using CPU's like server blades, or they may be server blades. The important part is that the CPU's are connected using switched fabric communications. There are a couple of technologies that are used for this. One is Infiniband.

Tim moves on to Lou who is standing nearby. Lou works for Halton, the local Caterpillar dealer. He is dealing with an IBM AS400 running an application written back at the Caterpillar factory in Illinois. The application is written in IBM Cobol.

Software is a vital part of our economy. Some of it is doing mundane work like keeping track of parts for bulldozers. Some of it keeps the wheels of finance turning and some of it is being used to attack difficult technical/scientific problems.

John has returned from exploring the lobby or wherever he was and he is ready to go. My brain is full so I say my goodbyes and we head back to the truck. John is tired and asks me to drive. There is a bit of creepy-crawly as we get on 26 and then there is the usual bottleneck approaching 185th. Other than that it is smooth sailing. We stop in North Plains to fill the tank ($85) before we head home for dinner.

Just for grins I ran a search on the web for an image for "IBM Cobol". IBM's page has a tiny image of the Red Fort in Dehli. I don't know why, but it was too tiny to post. Here is a slightly larger one.