Seoul, Korea

Dear Friends:

This week (and next), I'm on a whirlwind tour of Asia.  I started the trip here in Seoul, Korea.  I'll only be here for two days, before heading off to Tokyo.  The reason for the trip is that I've been invited to visit with press and our biggest customers - telling them about some significant software advances that we've made.

The trip to Seoul was a really long one.  I left the house at 5:30am on Sunday morning, and arrived at my hotel in Korea at about 7:30pm on Monday night.  Taking the time-zone changes into account, I was traveling for 24 hours straight.  I know that you won't feel sorry for me, but I'm...tired.

I started my meetings in Korea with a visit to the Seoul National University - one of the top 3 universities in Korea.  I was asked to visit with one of the leading professors of computer science.

Cool building on campus...

He is responsible for building Korea's biggest supercomputer, dubbed Chundoong.  It's in the top 500 supercomputers around the globe, and it's built using technology from my company.  Here I am, standing in front of part of the array:

The supercomputer is actually a "cluster" of computer "nodes".  Each one of nodes is basically a standard PC with 4 graphics cards attached.

Since the system runs for hours and hours at a time, and pushes the graphics cards to their limit, there's a lot of heat this generated.  To prevent failure if they overheated, the system uses liquid cooling.  The system pushes liquid over the chips and draws heat away from them, recycling the liquid for additional passes over the chips:

Next, I was taken to Samsung HQ, located just outside of Seoul in Suwon City.  Because Samsung has grown so large in the last few years, they've nearly taken over the city.  They have over 50,000 employees in this location alone.  They've essentially dubbed this the "Digital City" as Samsung has dozens of buildings covering a majority of the city:

This is just one of 10 parking lots surrounding the buildings...plus a multi-level parking garage...

The security checkpoint to get inside the compound was the most intense I've experienced.  They confiscated all USB drives, placed security stickers over the camera lenses of our phones and laptops, and then required everyone to install security software on any laptop brought into the buildings...

Essentially, this software shuts down the USB ports, bluetooth, networking...just about anything that could be used to snoop or gather information inside Samsung.  Needless to say, I didn't let them install any of this garbage on my machine, so we left my laptop in the car ; )

After the Samsung meetings, the AMD Korea team took me to a software developer named Hancom.  After a lengthy briefing, the managing director brought me into his office and told me where the company name came from.  The "Han" stands for "Hangul", which is the name of the Korean alphabet.  "Com" represents "computer".  The Hangul alphabet was created by King Sejong of Korea, about 600 years ago.  His image appears on the Korean currency.  The managing director presented me with a framed 10,000 won bill (it's worth about $10).  The artwork was gorgeous:

It was a sweet gesture, and will always help me remember the visit.  I do enjoy getting paid to visit people ; )

The long day finally ended with a team dinner.  They took me to a very, very traditional Korean BBQ restaurant.  For those that have never been to one of these places, you have the opportunity to cook various meats and some vegetables over coals or some heat source.  In this case, it was a special wood that had been burning for a while...the glow from the wood was actually beautiful:

When it was ready, they brought a "hose" from the ceiling, to vacuum any of the smoke from the meat that was cooking on the grill:

The food was fantastic.  The meat was marinated, plentiful, and quite tender.  I really appreciated that they wanted me to experience such a traditional meal.

The next day I was asked to conduct two press conferences.  This was a long day. I met with two groups of reporters and gave a presentation for each set.  The event was covered in several Korean news websites.  Here's a snippet from one:

 Other news websites had other pictures of me speaking in front of the group.  As you can see from these pictures, I apparently use my hands a lot when I speak ; )

If you actually want to see one of the interviews that was published (and you can read Korean), just click here.

I had a fantastic time in Korea and felt like I really helped our office there.  I was there for a little less than 48 hours, and then is was off to....Japan.  More on that in the next post!