This past Thursday, April Fools!, I had the honor of speaking at Exxon Mobil’s Technical Software Development conference in Houston. We were one of four external vendors invited to present and later do demos at this all-Exxon event. It was all proprietary so they put a black hood on me, took me to the room after many spins and twists and turns, I gave my presentation, then they hooded me again and escorted me back out of the building.  My talk was right after Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup on C++ and C++0x; definitely a tough act to follow but I did my best.

“One part agile software development, two parts parallel, many-core: Helping Exxon Mobil to reach for higher performance.”

January 31: So I ended up in Zhuozhou City about 120km from Beijing this week as a guest of the Geophysical Research Institute (GRI). I have trouble following the connection chart, and it changes, but to make a long, convoluted story seem short: it seems like the path is China National Petroleum Company (CNPC), which is then connected to PetroChina, which is then or also connected to the Bureau of Geophysical Processing (BGP), which is then the parent of GRI. GRI is the seismic processing workhorse and I think they do most of the seismic processing for the Chinese oilfields/companies.