Orange County Convention Center
At 7:00 p.m. on November 9, 1998, the PA system of the exhibition hall loudly announced the start of the gala opening. I stopped working on the moment and looked around the huge hall with colorful exhibition booths everywhere. Some people gave a shout of joy from some booth. It was the opening day of SC98, an annual exhibition of high-performance networking and computing technologies.
The venue was Orange County Convention Center with a total area of 93,000 square meters. It's larger than Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan. In this huge hall, various sessions and tutorial programs were to be held. The RWCP had a booth in the Research Area of the exhibition to demonstrate the results of its activities.
I'd heard of the exhibition since it was the RWCP's third time to participate in SC, but I was surprised at its vast scale as I myself was taking part in the event for the first time. What's more, only an open event like this could provide the comfortable pressure of seeing the direct responses of visitors to our booth. I like events very much and was very excited at the thought of the results of the RWCP's activities being exposed in an international context.
But I was the only one who was so carefree at this booth. To come here, researchers and staff members had to make unbelievably thorough preparations. Though I didn't know what it was like at the actual development site, I could easily imagine how much researchers' "blood, sweat and tears" had gone into assembling a PC cluster with 128 PCs, bring it across the ocean to Orlando and install it in the booth. Taking customs clearance for instance, it was frightening to see a lot of e-mail on the mailing list for this event. After shipping the machine from Japan to the United States, the staff came here three days before the exhibition and energetically reassembled, adjusted and confirmed the operation of the machine despite their jet lag. I had no right to say anything because I came here just before the event, but I just hoped that the machine would run without a hitch and attract many visitors.
The reason why I was sent to the event even though I'm a Promotion Department member and have never done any development work was that SC98 was an ideal opportunity to publish to the world Seamless Computing - the RWC Project's core technology. So, I came here to assist public relations and to get as many people as possible to become interested in the RWCP's activities. However, as I sat at the reception counter to present Uchiwa (Japanese fans) to visitors and tried to persuade them to fill in the agreement to receive a CD-ROM, perhaps the major effect was that it changed my awareness.
I'm afraid that it may sound like an excuse but I realized again that I did not know anything about the contents of the RWCP's research activities. The Real World Computing Project is an international scheme. To demonstrate its results, the RWCP took part not only in SC, an exhibition of parallel and distributed computing, but also in AAAI, an international showcase of real world intelligence technologies. The point is to clearly understand the position and evaluation of the RWCP's research results in the world. In fact, I honestly found while I was behind the reception counter that our project attracted many people.
Since distributed laboratories at NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi and GMD as well as from Mitsubishi Electric joined this exhibition, I realized again that the Real World Computing Partnership is a nexus of all members at distributed laboratories and the Tsukuba Research Center. I also became keenly aware that the project is supported by a number of people from other organizations such as subcontractors and outsourcing staff. I learned that many people were involved in our research activities, which is something I'd never have realized just from reading documents and e-mail inside the headquarters building in Tokyo. Some would say it's inevitable. But my honest impression as a back-office member is that attending the international event removed the blinkers from my eyes.
Before the exhibition, I expected that visitors to our booth would all be specialists interested in technical aspects of our demonstration. In fact, however, there were many people who were interested in the organization of the RWCP and its projects. Quite a few asked how a national project and research activities were being carried out in an organization consisting of industrial, academic and government personnel. As a member of the Promotion Department, I should have provided them with clear explanations, but I was often irritated by my own lack of clarity in English explanation, while they must have been much more irritated than I!
I really thought, "Since I'm a Promotion Department member and came here for PR purposes, I must tell our visitors what the highlights of the RWCP are, and what they should see before leaving the booth in fluent English!" But I don't know how many years I would need to be able to do that .... and no matter how many years it takes, I'll be happy if I can ever reach that level, but .... yes, but there are only three years to go until the end of the RWC Project. I will do my best to attract public attention to RWCP's specific results during the remaining years. So, I hope that all researchers and staff members will continue making efforts toward the goal. And it's my responsibility to publish the remarkable achievements of the RWCP broadly to the world.