Thursday’s Nearly Malicious Compliance

Thursday’s Nearly Malicious Compliance

The hackathon was all day, and Sandy and Amit were leading it via Zoom. A hackathon gave the center’s users hands-on help to hack at their specific coding problems, so it was one of the highest-rated training events of the year for the Pathfindera Supercomputing Center. There was no skipping it. It was their job, and jobs were not always abundant.

Sandy looked doubtfully at the leftover white fish she was eating for breakfast. The smell filled the kitchen and not in a good way.

“I hope this doesn’t kill me before the hackathon is over,” she wrote in the event chat to Amit.

“Hopefully it does not after, either,” replied Amit.

By 10:00 a.m., Sandy’s eyes were puffy.

“BRB,” she wrote in the chat.

She pulled her VW Beetle out of the garage, intending to go get some cortisone to put on her now burning face.

“POP!” went the Beetle, and it shuddered into a stall.

Suddenly, steam began rising from the engine. Coolant hemorrhaged.

Sandy had several choice words for the situation, but there was little she could do as long as the hackathon was running.

Soon, she was right back on Zoom. Her reflection in the main room’s black screen showed more than just puffy eyes. Her cheeks were swelling.

She told Amit what happened on the mentor chat.

“I could only drive that car now if my life depended on it.”

“Don’t,” replied Amit, “you’ll warp the engine.”

Soon, the questions were pouring in form the hackathon teams.

Someone could not get attached to the VSCode server, the visual software that made code easy to develop. Another set of teams were struggling with CMAKE, the tool that helped complicated codes compile to the instructions that a supercomputer like, Pathfindera, could execute.

All the while, Sandy’s face burned hotter and hotter.

“I hope these questions end soon,” she wrote into the mentor chat.

Suddenly, the universe obliged—the WiFi went out. The questions stopped abruptly.

As she went downstairs to find the router, Sandy let out a string of the strongest curses, involving the router’s grandmother and a donkey.

Sandy found her pet rabbit happily chewing on the power cord to the router.

She went into the hall closet to find the old router, in hopes the power cords were interchangeable. They were not. However, ten minutes later, and with some questionable soldering, the WiFi was back.

Sandy’s image in the hall mirror was not encouraging. Her lips were now qualified for the “after” picture in a fillers-gone-wrong meme. She could still breathe well enough, so she took some Benadryl and headed up to log back on to Zoom and the computers.

The afternoon wore on, the questions pelted. Sandy’s face swelled hotter and bigger. Her eyes were slits reflected in the screen.

Team one asked if they could have more time after the event today to work.

“Yes, I will leave the Zoom running so you can have time after the event,” Sandy wrote.

The team abruptly vanished from Zoom.

“Rude!” thought Sandy.

Team 3 asked if they could have a 1000-node reservation— a chunk that was most of the supercomputer— to test if their new code would run 1000 times faster at that scale. It would take most of the computer away from all the other users so the reservation would have to wait in the queue for everyone else’s work to finish.

Sandy sent the reservation request to the Pathfindera’s system’s team. Their response was, “ha ha”.

“I’m not joking,” she shot back.

“That could take a while,” they said.

“I’ll let them know,” she replied.

Then she answered Team 3, “I have put in the request, but the heat death of the universe is likely to start before your reservation does, ” she wrote.

After that she was going back and forth with Team 4 about what variables to make private between the different threads distributing their code’s loops over the processors in each node.

“If you do it the way you have it now, we will get race conditions—where the code could give slightly different answers each time you run it,” she explained in the chat.

Team 4 made the right variables private, and the code loop was saved. However, they missed one variable in the next loop. Race conditions began.

Sandy was about to tell them so, but she was having difficulty seeing through her swollen eyelids. She decided it was time to go seek help.

She opened a private chat with Amit and explained the situation.

“The clinic is not far. My car should make it at least halfway there,” she joked.

Suddenly, a barrage of emails hit from one of her other projects.

“Critical! Response needed now!” was the tone of it.

They only needed her slides, so she fought with the interface to the company SharePoint database to extract them.

After several minutes, Amit’s instant message popped up.

“Why are you still on—you need to go to the clinic.”

Just as SharePoint popped up another empty version of the slides’ file, in exasperation, she wrote Amit back, “I just wish this would all end! Completely!”

Suddenly, all matter in the universe dissociated and spread out evenly. Everything went cold—very cold, like almost absolute zero cold. Everything stopped by every imaginable measure of the word “stop.”

How long things stayed like this was immeasurable, but eventually matter began to organize itself into the form of the Pathfindera supercomputer and all its components. As absurdly improbable as this was, next came its systems admins. A 1000-node job reservation came up for Team 3 and started running. The universe assembled itself more or less as it had been from there.

Sandy took a deep breath and blinked as best as her swollen lids would allow, largely unaware that her atoms had just participated in the heat death of the universe. She did, however, marvel at the thanks she got in the hackathon chat from Team 3 about the speedy granting of their 1000-node reservation.

“Really improbable things must be afoot,” she wrote Amit in the chat.

In this new assembly of the universe, SharePoint actually delivered files with content—an unlikely outcome—but it allowed Sandy to move forward with her plan to go to the clinic after a few minutes of wrangling the slide into an email.

The coolant-emitting Beetle was her only option. She said a little prayer and started it up.

Halfway to the clinic, it gave a metallic sigh and just stopped in the middle of the road.

She texted her husband for help. He would have to leave work. She was now starting to have difficulty breathing.

“I wish this would end,” she wrote.

Apart went the atoms. Again, the universe remained in a cold, unchanging pause until Team 3’s 1000-node job once again started the unreasonably improbable reassembly.

In the next iteration of the loop, Sandy’s Beetle made it all the way to the clinic, but Sandy did not.

As she was asphyxiating from her anaphylactic shock, she typed to her husband:

“I’m so sorry this has ended.”

Her last thought was that Team 4 still had a variable that needed to be set to private in their second loop. Their code would lead to different outcomes each time it ran. Maybe fate worked the same way.

Apart went the atoms—again. A vast eternity passed. Team 3’s job started running. Back on Zoom, Team 4 found the variable that had caused the race conditions and made it private. SharePoint resumed its absolutely no-sharing policy. Sandy gave up sooner on the slides this time, and they never made it in to email. But this time, both Sandy and the Beetle made it to the clinic.

Sandy was given an IV and some epinephrine. Soon, she was loaded into an ambulance on its way to a full hospital.

She recovered enough to text her husband what was happening.

She tapped out, “I hope this doesn’t happen tomorrow.” But something in the back of her mind told her not to send it. She erased the text and went to sleep.

That evening, at 5 o’clock after Amit had officially closed the hackathon, Team 1 popped back into existence and complained about their lack of productivity on the now otherwise silent chat.