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 One of the events taking place outside of the San Jose downtown area was a guided tour of the IBM Almaden Research Center. Above and below are photos of "Blue Gene", the 39th fastest computer on the planet at 9.36 terraflops (which served as the prototype for the current #1 fastest computer on the planet, "Blue Gene/L", at 280 terraflops)
 Along with the supercomputing facility, we were able to tour the machine shop, which hosted an amazing assortment of tools for making even more tools. We were given demonstrations of the EMD (electromagnetic discharge machine), which is used for precision cutting of metal, as well as the SLA (stereolythographic apparatus) seen below.
 The SLA is a rapid prototyping machine that uses a special polymer in an additive process to build an object. As opposed to many rapid prototyping machines that mill away excess material, this one works by layering this polymer on top of itself, essentially stacking up until the object is complete. The piece being built by the machine in this photo is a demonstration wrench, which takes about 3 hours to make. It was very nice of IBM to plan ahead and make copies of the wrench for each of us on the tour to take home.
 We also got to tour the organic chemistry lab, where IBM creates new molecules and chemicals to assist in the production of microchip manufacturing.
Check out this cool video clip of chemicals being mixed.
Finally, the tour concluded with a history of the research facility, as well as the commissioned art work installed there. One of the highlights for me was seeing this old RAMAC from 1956, one of the first hard disk storage drives in existance.
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The opening ceremony kicked off tonight at city hall, and the initial lighting of the Digital Kakejiku piece went underway with a burst of mist.
