Conrad Winchester
Bio
After a mind-blowing trip through university, Conrad started real work in scientific programming at University College London. His forte was FORTRAN-90 and parallel FORTRAN for Cray-YMP8 super computers.
After briefly tiring of computers he became a free-lance body piercer for 3 years. During this time he taught himself a whole load of web technologies, and when the piercing bubble burst, got himself employed by Gameplay producing web widgets for their shop.
After several other java/web jobs he ended up working for gamer.tv where he programmed some multi-player online games in flash - DinkyBomb V2 and Oddballs Bowling. They were both in AS 1 and it hurt his Java sensibilities to use such a primitive language. However he enjoyed what could be made with it.
Conrad then moved on to the gambling industry at NT Media (later bought by Orbis) where he honed his AS2 skills. AS3 came out whilst he was there and soon that was the only kind of Actionscript he was interested in.
Probably his most famous contributions to the gambling world are Ladbrokes multi-player Backgammon and the ubiquitous Chain Reactors.
Conrad then started using flex as a tool for earning money and it became his main technology choice. Everything was wonderful, he could earn lots of money and make himself comfortable: The future looked great! Then it all started to unravel. There were big fights over technology and Adobe shook a lot of large companies confidence with their announcements about Flash and Flex last year.
Conrad realised that putting all your eggs in one technological basket was a mistake. He is still making extremely advanced user interfaces using Flex, but is also on a quest to find a new technology that can satisfy his creative and technical needs. He has yet to find the answer, and fears it may be a long journey.
Session
I've Got a Supercomputer and I Know How to Use It!
20 years ago super computers were hidden away in research institutes, cost millions of pounds and required special permission before you were even allowed to run programs on them.
Over the past few years there has been a quiet revolution and supercomputers have been stealthily invading your homes. They no longer cost millions, they are intact so cheap that even modest laptops come with them pre-installed.
I am talking about the GPU - the graphics cards. 3D graphics accelerator that makes it possible to play amazing game are also incredibly powerful super computers. For example the NVidia graphics card in the latest macbook pro has, not 2, not 4, but 384 cores all designed to perform calculations incredibly quickly.
In this talk I will show you how you can harness the power of the super computer at the heart of your graphics cards - I will show how it can be used to perform massively parallel calculations 100's of times faster than on the CPU.
The GPU is the future and I hope to inspire you to start harnessing the incredible power available.