Waco wrote:just brew it! wrote:It's like when people ask me if I knew so-and-so when I worked at Fermilab. Thousands of employees, of which I probably knew several dozen at best.
The HPC community at LANL is pretty small, but in terms of employees there are almost 20,000 spread across the campus. If they don't touch computers in any way, I probably don't know them.
When I was at Fermi, my group was even a narrowly focused subset of the HPC people. Although experimental particle accelerator physics was the bulk of the activity at Fermi overall, during the time I was there the group I was in exclusively supported the theorists; we designed, built, and supported what was essentially a massive bespoke
Lattice QCD machine. So outside my immediate group and the theoretical physicists, I didn't know many people there well.
Edit: Amusing side note... I currently share an office with one of my former Fermi co-workers. It seems that our career paths are required to cross about once a decade. This is the third place we've worked together, with both of us having had other jobs in between.