ACACES-2009 Summer School - Day 0: Getting there

It's been a while, I know. But I'll try and make up for it. Here's the first post in a ACACES-2009 Summer School series. Thanks to Itkovian for letting me use his pictures here.

On Sunday July 12th, I left home early to catch my direct Brussels Airlines flight to Barcelona. I woke up at 6.45am, to catch the train at 7.37am direction Brussels Airport. We arrived in the airport at 9.30am, way early for a flight due to leave at 11.25am. Once we got through checkin and security, we noticed a one hour delay while making our way to the departure gate. We killed the time by visiting Starbucks and purchasing internet access, only to find out later our flight was even more delayed: up to 2.5 hours. No fun, especially because the flight from Brussels to Barcelona only takes 2 hours. Urgh.

After skimming the Brussels Airlines General conditions online, it seemed we might be able to get some compensation, up to €250 for a flight of less than 1.500km which got delayed over 2 hours. Sadly, after visiting the service desk, it seemed I had missed something. The compensation was provided when a flight got cancelled, and a delay of over 2 hours resulted from that.

In our particular case the flight was only delayed, according to the guy behind the service desk. Although they needed to replace the plane, and make us wait for 2.5 hours until it was ready, the flight wasn't cancelled only delayed. Makes sense if you know that canceling results in paying each customer €250 cash, while delay only requires them to provide an €11 voucher for food and beverages, to use in the airport on the day of departure. Typical.

After finally arriving in Barcelona at 4pm and waiting for our luggage, we decided to share a taxi instead of using the train and shuttle bus to get to the hotel/conference centre La Mola in Terrassa. A wise decision, because we arrived in the hotel somewhat after 6pm, which allowed us to quickly freshen up before the keynote talk at 7pm.

The keynote talk on bio-inspired massively parallel computer architectures was given by Steve Furber (Manchester University). He talked about his SpiNNaker project, in which he and his colleagues are trying to build a system which should be able to simulate one billion neurons (roughly 1% of a human brain) in real time using one million ARM processors. Cylons, anyone?

After the keynote, we rushed to the buffet dinner. The buffet was OK, but not fantastic, and to me it was lacking something else than regular water as an accompanying drink. Ah well.

Before calling it a night, some of the UGent participants decided to taste the Spanish beer from the hotel bar. Although it was quite expensive (€4.50 for a large beer), I quite enjoyed it to wash down the mostly frustrating day. Once the beer was sipped down slowly, we all went to bed, making sure we would be able to get up early the next morning for the start of the classes.