Hello and welcome back here for today's special team edition driver spotlight today We are taking a look at the iTandem ESDA team so big. Thank you to iTandem definitely a good group of guys for today's team spotlight We're gonna be taking a look at that three of their iTandem ESDA drivers, so make sure you guys follow me on all social media all found in the description box below and let's get to it So when I said I had a special for today here on Friday beginning of FD season That is this team Spotlight of iTandem you guys know I've worked and driven with iTandem before and iTandem adi So today we're taking a look at there's three drivers that are in the sda. The first one is nick herrington's Purpose built s15 for ESDA and potentially vdc in the future So it's just a basic s15 with some underglow and some really nice gold browns wheels Definitely a super clean car and livery of course on point So this is the first of three cars We're gonna take a look at today So a little bit longer of an episode because you know we're taking them all to Irwindale But we are on the streets of Long Beach here today where the first round of ESDA is so first credit We're credit is due on this s15 It is credit 3d model is from iTandem every day the body kit ACM platforms and RH Fenton and the wheels are nismo gtl m3 wheels car physics Chris Witowski Vdc driver noticing a lot of people using his physics. It might be a spec thing I didn't really look at the rules vsda So the car physics are modified by iTandem adi the custom 2j Sound done by iTandem adi and a car was put together by cozy designs and you know some 3d modeling By derpy designs, so we're gonna go full send in the first car here for today Once again a big thank you to adi and all the other guys from iTandem Nick Harrington allowing me access to their cars here for today's episode So we got a big old firewall from the back of this car So we're gonna heat up these tires because we are on the ESDA streets of Long Beach circuit because that is where round One is gonna be I cannot see just like forza It's a problem with running third person sometimes for these videos You can't really see some parts of the track and I have a feeling it's gonna happen on Initiation if I'm that close to the law just like it was in force much 47. So s15 Long Beach iTandem. Let's do it Kind of a gentle initiation for the first run. Oh, okay, trying to gauge grip levels All right, so it's definitely got a lot of grip to bring it all the way out so long Okay, so this was a very off-the-line run. I Feel like Complete and full move here on Long Beach with that run But first run out all these different cars been driving a lot of cars Recently in this week for the spotlight and everybody's cars are very different, which is something I'm extremely, you know happy to do and you know, we're just gonna expect to get some freshies get some fresh skins on here It's something I really love doing and you know once I get a big Thank you to all the drivers that have given me access to the ESDA pro cars For these driver spotlights, you know, it's definitely a lot of fun and I've been enjoying doing the series. So Another run here in the s15 Trying to get a better entry Okay, that was over short Did not quite stretch though. Okay. We kind of did but we put that away too long And Nowhere near the inter clip so these drivers have definitely been driving their cars and tuning their cars to their likings And you know, everybody's driving styles different and if doing this driver spot, it hasn't proven that Today's episode will definitely prove that I have three cars from the same team That are totally different driving styles. I tested the cars a little bit and Gotten to you know to feel them even though they're based off similar physics They're very different because each driver is different So, you know the fact that I can not totally crash is a plus in my book So we're gonna go one more run here in the s15 then we'll switch up to another car for today's spotlight in the team I tandem spotlight. We hit a cone Has a little bit better of an entry Kind of where we need to be Okay, that was Honestly a much better run than all the other runs. So a successful run I feel in the car. We probably zeroed out by not completing the finish line. So Big thank you to the Carrington for the access of his F2 team We're gonna see this car again at Irwindale, but we're gonna go take a look at another car here for today So for those of you guys who may know these guys not by the real names but by their I tandem names Nick is I tandem froze We have Matt here who is I tandem profit So his S13 right here hits close to home with me because I am an s chassis lover and the 13 was one of the First cars I drove and this model is absolutely stunning those work wheels and the way the body kit and everything the flat diffusion everything It's definitely an amazing looking car and once again, you know the livery on point I tandem always coming out with amazing looking liveries and their team cars have always been great from you know forza And you know up now into a set of Corsa and things like that So a few credits where credits are due here for this S13 and we got to pull that up. So Matthew is also I tandem profit. So Definitely in a very very amazing S13 we have yellow days S13 rims unknown So they're very cool rims. They're kind of unknown though I believe Addy, you know has a little more information on that So the modeling was done by a tandem every day the mapping and texturing of course also done by a tandem every day Colliders done by I tandem every day if you notice these cars were all built from the I tandem guys So they all got together to build all their cars the paint was done by infamous which is I'm assuming the same people who did the paint on the other cars and then original physics Chris Wadowski's and Modified by Addy and the sound also by Addy So Addy's definitely been getting in doing a lot more physics and sounds and things of that nature So S13 is next up here on the streets of Long Beach Do a little heat up of the tires Trying not to crash these guys cars because all as I said that wall taps the back of the 13 sorry profit So we're gonna go full send in the 13 and we have one final car that we're gonna test here at Long Beach And of course we can take all of these cars to Irwindale See what we can do here in the 13 We're here roll out I stalled it Just stay a little bit more in boost. Oh That was really close to that wall That any part wasn't that I thought that was totally going to be a bad run But any part wasn't too too terrible. So We're gonna go another full run luckily we can drive backwards to get back to the starting line and not you know penalize ourselves Rip if I actually got penalized This is bringing me back to the force of motion for seven days when we were on Long Beach doing these open lobbies and testing and doing stuff Like that for weeks for you know, ESDA and you know SSR and all this other competitions they used to compete in definitely want to get more into competing So you guys will see that here on the channel very shortly So let's try and actually not stall the car out this time I guess they in boost is the main thing Oh Sorry profit like I said a little bit of a wall tap too much Of a little tap to come back from that, but we will finish the runoff Definitely enjoying how this 13 is handling. It's a very Similar to I guess how it would handle some my personal driving style Which is not super snappy But snappy when you need it to be a lot of the cars that I've been running have been very snappy Which is not I guess you would say in my driving styles a new style that I'm starting to get more and more into They're just full of art of that cone. It's fine So we're gonna go more run in this car And then we're gonna pull out the car that I say rip it to headphone users Because you're gonna need to turn it down for the next car. So one more run in the 13 Can't see perfect entry then It seems to be our final run are our better runs of all this is actually very good run. I Would take that run in a heartbeat Little one time at the end and tanked it in the front So we're gonna take a look at the last car in this itan to me is da team So make sure you guys turn your headphones down if you're wearing headphones because this car will blow you out your headphones So the final car for today's episode is that of itan to Maddie's Very aggressive very loud skyline. So when I say very aggressive very loud I'm just gonna start this thing up and you guys are gonna hear it. So if you have headphones turn them down a little bit ready for this Hold on This car is so loud.  It's definitely a really cool r33 0.4 I guess you would say as he words it because it's an r33 rear-end with a R34 front so a little bit credit where credit is due on this car Definitely like the light up itan them logo in the front and all the liver is never seen credit Where credit is due and some information on the car So I tandem Addie his cars are always a little extra and this is a r33 point four So a little bit information on the car on why it is the way it is if you haven't guessed so the front end of the r34 front end is from the Shuto revival project or shiitoko revival project the r33 rear-end is from remote Remco and It was by SPR and triple sevens all the information obviously on the screen because you know sometimes I stumble on words and Rims were done by itan them every day modeling done by itan them Jack and K and C cosmic Mapping and texturing done by B DC Z and colliders from itan them Addie paint once again from infamous original physics and modified physics from itan them Addie and of course this aggressive sound from itan them Addie as well, so we're gonna go full set on this car. We need to turn the audio down a lot So I didn't oh gosh At least cars got a really heavy clutch. I Mean this is louder than that x-15 So we're gonna go full-send and Addie's car Addie's car definitely extra as he always is so let's go full-send Entry not expecting it to snap the way it did. Oh, I should have went in the third So he did tell me to run a 4-1 gear ratio, but I feel like 4-1 is not working Super correct for obviously my driving style. So we're gonna go back to pits.   I almost stole the car, but we're good Not a half bad run in his car Like I said, you guys have noticed these three cars same team Original base physics totally different the way the cars react are all different So we're gonna give one final run in Addie's car Hopefully we can do another full pull like we have in the other guys cars, and we're gonna hit up Erwin Dale cars just so loud Cut that a little short, but we'll take it Hang that out there very short very cut that really short But we've been managed to not wreck the car so let's head up to Erwin Dale to test these cars on the banks and See if we can't get a little rowdy on the wall So once again a big thank you to I tandem Addie I tandem froze and I tandem profit for Letting me do you get the chance to drive these amazing ASDA pro cars I tandem definitely a team that I've loved working with and continue to work with here in the future. Hopefully so Figured we bring Addie's car because they're already in it and my audio was already queued down So we don't blow your ears up So we're gonna get one or two runs per car here like I said bigger episode today team Spotlight definitely super glad to do this for these guys. This these cars are insane. The guys are great guys, too Let's get a roll out massage it up to the wall Oh that car got a little more England than I thought it would right there. I hang that out a little bit Tandems at his car always wanted to do almost a backwards entry Okay, so it kind of starts to snap mid-transition. So gotta be mindful of that Because I noticed when the poost fully kicks in the car is just like nope I'm just gonna kick this way or I'm gonna kick this way. So like I said definitely very different style driving on all three of these cars but these cars are incredible and I yeah the sound of this cars insane Probably one of my favorite sounding cars so far Can't see that means we're perfect on the wall There we go not as deep as I'd like to be to this section, but Gotta make sure we clutch kick when we come off a Nice decent run in Addie's are 33.4 We may have heard it though. I think we may have hurt the car. Sorry Addie I may have done some engine damage I do apologize, but you can have the car back. I hope you can fix it before ESDA So let's switch to the next car take another one of these itanum cars are here on the banks of Erwin Dale I mean are bringing out itanum frozen S15 to try and tackle the bank Once again, this car looks like it's gonna be a fourth gear ripper here on the bank See if we can't do a full run without crashing. We didn't crash Addie's car So go to not crash these cars Highline massaging about the leader Definitely very different if you notice it doesn't snap as much as Addie's cars I say that we go full backwards whoo we almost wrecked the car as I said we go full backwards You know I gotta keep my mouth. It's like the announcer's curse, you know, you're doing good and the next thing you know Rip, so we're gonna reset that All right, we're gonna go and try and reset that now that we know the car can do that I was ready for this time Didn't go where I wanted to go though, but I Think we got this the hip kind of messed me up a little bit. I hope that We can get a good perfect run with this car before We switch the next one. I know I want a clean full pull like we did with Addie's car Gotta do roses car justice Hopefully we have enough tires to run another run, but we're gonna find out. We'll send Oh, we're low on tires Say that already Yep, we definitely do not have tires to finish this off But we're gonna finish at least the inner bank where we screwed up last time There we go. So I think successful ish runs in the 15 definitely like how this car drives So we got one more car to try so it's gonna switch it up So final car here Irwin Dale is I've had a profit and his S13 quietest car as a group So it's a little bit ending the video on a little bit of a quiet note But hopefully not a quiet note when it comes to the run here with his car Irwin Dale definitely good or bad sometimes some days. It's good. Sometimes it's bad Today it's not too too bad for us. Oh Yeah That's definitely what I'm liking right now Like I said at Long Beach's car is very similar to my style of driving which oh, yeah, we're We're kind of locking it in with this car province 13 Maybe the quietest but the deadliest right now in my in my hands anyways I know the guys from my tandem once again I think thank you to all of them for giving me the chance to drive these cars all of them in their individual cars are nothing to Be reckoned with they're definitely hard charging drivers, but for me, you know Driving all these different cars. I gotta I gotta say one is similar to my style. And of course, it's gotta be the 13 Because my love of 13s and of course the driving style is very shimmery So a little bit smoother as we can see kind of getting up there on the bank Click bring it up to the wall Sgt little wall tap nothing major Save that So I think that'll do it here for this team episode of itanum big thank you to the itanum guys and everybody that made these cars possible They all did an amazing job looking forward to seeing these guys compete in e sda So make sure you guys follow me on all social media knowledge found scripture box below if you guys want to get your cars And driver spotlight, you know what to do message me on Instagram and or discord and we can get your car in a driver's Spotlight so as always I thank you guys for coming back and watching happy for rabbit. I'll see you guys on the track You


Welcome to the City of Columbia's 2021 National Financial Literacy Month. My name is Valerie Austin and I am the Financial Empowerment Program Specialist for the Office of Community Development. This year we are celebrating our National Financial Literacy Month by highlighting different financial programs and initiatives that the Office of Community Development administers to our city residents. One of our financial initiatives that have been very successful over the years is our Bank on Columbia initiative. Bank on Columbia provides Columbia's residents access to affordable bank accounts and reconnecting them with mainstream financial institutions. The goal for this financial program is to educate Columbia's residents with in-depth financial literacy workshops. Our partner financial institution helps assist the program with financial materials and affordable accounts. Another financial initiative that our Office of Community Development administers is Columbia Kids Save. Columbia Kids Save provides a long-term affordable savings account for students enrolled in kindergarten at Walker Nantz Elementary and Carver Lyon Elementary Schools. The Office of Community Development provides an initial seed deposit of $50 and we will also match each account dollar-for-dollar up to $50 each year. This program not only encourages young students to save but it educates them on the importance of saving. It helps them save for higher education or it can be used to open a business or purchase a home when students reach the age of 18. These savings accounts are built by contributions from family, friends, and students themselves. Office of Community Development partners with financial institutions such as First Horizon, VB&T, and South State Bank to help assist our residents with their financial needs and providing them with affordable accounts and reconnecting them with mainstream financial institutions. Again, I welcome you all to our first virtual National Financial Literacy Month.


All right Well, I'll be talking about the multi-axial project today also about easy. So I will explain a little bit. What is easy? What is multi-axial? How do they tie together? And thanks to Bart because you already gave a very nice introduction about CSMFS and things like that. So I can probably go quickly through the slides that cover CSMFS. So my name is Kasper van Leuwen. I work at SURF. I've been working at SURF for the past six years now. It's an HPC work, some high-performance machine learning. And if you've seen my name on GitHub somewhere floating around, I already had a couple of people who said like, hey, I think I've seen your GitHub tag somewhere. That's correct. I'm also an EasyBuild maintainer and I made some contributions to EasyBuild itself as well. So yeah, if you want to complain or talk to me about our pass support or easy stack files, those are the things that I mainly worked on and of course some easy contributions. Before I start, there was a talk yesterday that was covering, you know, how difficult it can be to maintain a local software stack because of the scientific software, you know, it doesn't really adhere to any versioning standards or, you know, even explain how you should install this piece of software, right? People just take the script from somewhere. They find some GitHub repository in the publication and they think, oh, I can use the same thing, but it contains zero information on how to install it and how to get it running. There was actually an initiative in the Netherlands, not by us, but by a sister organization of SURF, to help scientists a little bit think about this in advance and to write what they call a software management plan. So it's an interesting read if you want to try to stimulate your scientists to do a little bit better on the software development side and think about these things in advance. It could be nice to point them out to this. So small disclaimer, I was on the sounding board for this guide. I'm not completely independent. But one of the tables that is, you know, to me was quite, quite useful is basically this all of the things that you should think about, right? But then, sorry, it's a little bit small, I know. But it also says like, okay, you know, how deep you should go into your software management also depends on what you think the expected impact of that software is, right? Is this a script that you're just developing for yourself? Is it going to be used by one or two colleagues or is this going to be used by tens or hundreds of people also maybe outside your department, right? Those require different levels of software management. And deployment documentation is one of the things that being pointed out to the scientists is being an important aspect to think about. Alright, so on to the actual topic. I have a dream and my dream is that scientists can run their computation on any computer infrastructure they want with whatever software they need on any data that they want. And of course, I'm an HPC person also making the most efficient usage of that computer infrastructure. And I don't think I'm alone in that dream, because EC also has a dream, which is to provide a cross-platform ready to use optimized software stack. And by that we mean cross-platform, which run on anything from a laptop to an HPC cluster, just as Bart mentioned. It should be ready to use, so it's just mountain go, right? There should be no effort in getting this thing installed or anything. It should be optimized, so it should make the most out of your hardware. So it should recognize what CPU architecture are you using and do something sensible for that CPU architecture. And of course, it should be a stack of scientific software, because that's what we want to run, right? So basically that takes already two of my boxes. So for me, this is an important project. You know, if we get easy going, then a sort of halfway there for my dream. We're not doing this alone. There's a big group of people involved. You recognize some of the Dutch universities, also University of Cambridge. But also we see cloud vendors that are very interested in this big HPC centers throughout Europe are interested in this. So it's definitely something that, you know, that falls into further ground this idea, right? I think also what a lot of people here will recognize is that HPC centers spend a lot of time managing their software environments for their users, because it's a complex environment. And of course, the focus on performance for us is important because we know that the users run big calculations and if they can do this, even just 5% more efficiently, that can mean a lot of hardware that is associated with that and therefore a lot of money, right? So it's important to think about this optimization. At the same time, we live in an increasingly complex world. So there's more and more research software out there. We get, at least at SERV, we know that we get more non-traditional HPC users who often also lack HPC experience, especially from the machine learning community. A lot of people, for example, from social sciences who've never used HPC systems before, but now they want to do some machine learning and they actually need quite a fair amount of compute and they now land on our cluster. That's a hard user group to serve. And then we also have more and more flavors of hardware out there. So all in all, it's a daunting challenge for HPC stuff. Of course, this is not new, right? I mean, it's one of the reasons we're here. We're all using EasyBuild. There's other build tools we have spec. And this is basically our effort of sharing that burden a little bit with other people from the HPC support community, right? We can standardize our build recipes according to some format and it doesn't matter if that's spec or EasyBuild, but it allows you to share what you know about how a certain piece of software should be installed with the rest of the community. But each side still installs their own stack. And if you want to do proper software testing, you kind of need to do that yourself, right? So yeah, we share some of the effort, but there's also some of the effort that we don't share yet. And if you look on the EasyBuild Slack, you'll notice, you know, even if we have an easy config, build procedures don't always work out of the box. You might be running on a different operating system than the person who developed the easy config and suddenly for you, you get a problem. And that is one of the ideas of Easy is kind of to take that next step in sharing this burden, right? Rather than working on build recipes and then doing the build ourselves on our own systems, why don't we work together and actually build one copy of the software stack so that everybody can just use that same couple. Also, I think there's a big benefit to end users, not just us HPC support people. But for the end user, if you want to move from one system to another, and this is also something that Bart already mentioned that is important in Canada as well. We get the same request in the Netherlands from the tier two sites, so those are the local universities, they often have their own clusters. And what we see is that users come from there, right? They start there and when they outgrow their own cluster, they come to us. But it's a lot of hassle because it means they need to recreate their own software environment. They need to move their data and the data moving part we cannot solve here. But it's usually the software recreation part that takes a lot of effort because they try to set it up in the same way, but they still get slightly different results and you have to figure out why, right? They get a certain mismatching version or whatever or something else a configure flag that was slightly different. Yeah, that's a lot of hassle. So it would be much nicer if they can just use the same software environment on any of these systems. So what is the scope for easy? Well, we want to create one share repository of my software installations. We want to try to avoid as much as possible duplication of work between IP support teams. We want to provide a uniform way of providing software to our end users, regardless of which system they use. And it should work on any Linux OS and we've also tried this on the Windows system for Linux and possibly will make it work on Mac OS. I don't think that works right now. And it should work on a wide range of system marketing. We cannot know which cluster user will want to run this on. It needs to cover a wide range. And then we'll have a very strong focus on performance, also on automation, testing and collaboration. One of the questions that we often get is like, okay, well, portability, that's nice portability of software isn't that solved by containers. That's something it's a question I get a lot also from my colleagues with inserved that work more on, for example, cloud computing and they're like, you know, containers are the solution to everything. Well, to me they're not and there's a couple of reasons for that. And there's probably more I just list a few here. Containers are designed for portability. So yeah, they tend to be very portable. But that's also why they are built typically without any hardware specific optimization.  Those containers are usually generically optimized. Of course, you could make a different choice, right? You could build multiple copies of the container, etc. It's solvable, but nobody does. They're quite large and bulky, like containers easily several gigabytes. So if you just want to use a single small tool, you have to pull in a full container just to use that one tool. It's not very efficient, not very friendly on your networking either, especially if you, you know, you have a lot of users doing this on your HPC system at the same time. It's pretty static environment. So if you have a container as a user and then you think, oh, I need this one additional tool. What are you going to do? You're going to rebuild the container or you're going to pull in another one just to provide that one tool. Not very flexible. And it's a lot of duplication. Essentially, each container is a full software stack. Does the software in that container do what you expected to do? Are you going to test that? Are you going to test that for all the containers that you work with? And essentially your testing problem is no longer testing one software stack, but testing many software stacks that makes the problem even harder. So, yeah, we had a look around and we figured, okay, let's, you know, let's not throw away the good part, right? So containers are isolated from the host because they have their own OS. The part already mentioned that is exactly what the compatibility layer also does for the Alliance and that is also why we use a compatibility layer as well and easy. And of course, we also had a good look at what the Alliance is doing. They have a shared software stack that works between their systems. So we had a very careful look, what do they do? What do we want to do differently here in Europe? And of course, they do it for their systems. We want to make it a little bit more community driven and make do things like community contributions, etc. And also support a wider range of architectures, right?  Here we want it to basically work on, well, any architecture is a big word, but a lot of architectures. Right there. Well, we take a big group pot and then we put some ingredients in the first one is Gen2 prefix. So that is this compatibility layer. It provides abstraction from our host OS, as is also done by a container OS. Second ingredient is EasyBuild. It could in theory be any build tool, but we use EasyBuild simply because a lot of the people in the project are familiar with EasyBuild. And this was to do optimized builds for a large range of range of hardware architectures. And there's also, of course, a large scientific software that is supported in EasyBuild. Finally, we need a way to get it to the end user system, so that's where we use the MFS. And this was also already mentioned yesterday, right? ArchSpec is a tool to detect what is the architecture of the machine that you're working on. And in Easy, we use that to determine, okay, which copy of the stack are we actually going to search. So we basically have multiple copies of the same software stack optimized for different hardware architectures. And then at runtime when you mount EasyStack, we'll decide, okay, you are running on Skylake-based system, you know, we'll point you to the Skylake prefix with all of the software that's in there. And this is another view, abstract view of what it looks like. So you have a host operating system underneath, right? And we have the file system layer, which is this Syrn-PMFS that takes care of the distribution of our software stack, the compatibility layer to provide the isolation from the host. And then finally the software layer that contains all of the end user applications. Of course, there are some connections there, like Bud also said, like they have this gray area, right? So it comes to drivers when it comes to an MPI, and you can discuss where that should be, and maybe you should be able to use the host MPI because you know that that works better. So we're also looking into how to support those kind of things. A little bit about Syrn-PMFS. So it was developed by Syrn to distribute software on the worldwide computing grid. So actually the way in which the alliance in which easy user and PMFS is exactly what it's meant for, right? It's just a POSIX read-only file system, which is mounted in user space and you, yeah, basically you can serve it over the web. It's a web-based file system. There's a strong focus on redundancy and IR performance. You can set up multiple layers of caching, multiple mirrors. And of course, that's also needed like in a worldwide computer grid that also involves a lot of nodes, right? So, yeah, they need to have sufficient redundancy there as well. And a nice thing over containers is that this pulls in files as they are needed, right? So you can pull in a single script from the EC repository if that's just the one script that you need. You don't need to pull in the full file. And anything from the compatibility layer that a script uses, which you don't need to pull in the full software stack if you don't need it. A little bit of a graphic, what it looks like. So the stratum zero basically contains master copy, right? That is sort of the determining factor of what is in the software stack. The stratum ones mirror that stratum zero and they provide the redundancy and the load distribution. And then there can be several layers of caching. So the first proxy in between you can have a local cache on the system itself. And that is displayed here and then anything, you know, you can connect an HPC to it, you can connect the laptop to it. It doesn't matter. So the compatibility layer. Also, we use Gen2 prefix because it's convenient. And also because we had a good discussion with the Alliance, you know, why not mix. And it basically is limited to the low level stuff. So things like G-Lib C are provided by the Gen2 layer. There's a couple of low level dependencies that we don't use from Easy Build anymore, but from Gen2 prefix. And we support currently three processor families, so ARM, PowerPC, and X86. And it basically creates a level playing field for the software layer that can be built on top. That's where we optimize for different micro architectures. We have basically different prefixes where we optimize for, you know, Gen2, Gen3, Graviton2, Graviton3, the different Intel architectures, etc. So all of this is installed with Easy Build, everything that's in the software layer. And the best sort of directory for the host is automatically selected by architect, as I mentioned before. So, you know, your end user doesn't have to know about what hardware they're running on. They can just mount this even with S-Tec and go. It's also very useful if you don't know which hardware you're going to land on. So if you have a heterogeneous partition, we used to have that at surf, kind of annoying to then get the right optimization for your software. This makes it very easy. We have a proof of concept going. There's a pilot stack there. It doesn't contain a huge list of software because that was not the point of the pilot stack. It was just for us to learn and show how this can work. There's a CERN VMFS start from zero running in Groningen, and we have four start from one servers. Then we have a couple of software packages just to illustrate how it works. And the hardware targets that we support are listed underneath here. So it's basically the most recent of Intel, AMD, and ARM. This multi-scale thing that you might have heard in the hallways. I cannot already mention that you're doing yesterday. So multi-scale is a European project. It's a Euro HPC center of excellence. It's focused on multi-scale modeling. And we have a 6 million euro budget, but across 13 sites. And it's a four year project. We just started this year. And it's essentially a collaboration between the SICOM network, which is the center for atomic and molecular simulations. They do a lot of scientific software development as well, and several partners in EZ. And we have five main work packages, three of which are technical. So they are really doing code development for this multi-scale modeling. And two of them are technical and they are basically about developing and supporting EZ. And through that, we want to facilitate the scientific work packages. So what do those technical work packages look like? Well, the first one is really about developing the EZ software stack, developing additional features, make it more mature, add new architectures to it, et cetera. And the second work package is more about maintaining and monitoring the quality of the software stack, making sure that the performance today is also the same as the performance last week, and about processing community contributions that come in. Some key benefits here of the multi-scale project to EZ is that multi-scale has dedicated funding. EZ does not. We used to just work on EZ in our spare time, on our Friday afternoon, whenever we could find some time. But now we actually have some dedicated resources to work on EZ. And the nice thing is also that the project plan that we wrote for multi-scale also gives a little bit of a roadmap, a little bit of direction to EZ to the project. Because we know what multi-scale will be working and focusing. Also in multi-scale, of course, we have this connection with the scientific work packages. So these are basically end users of EZ, right? And that gives us a nice feedback loop. We can talk to these people and ask them what works for you, you know, what barriers are you hitting when you're using this app? We also want to stimulate, you know, to make EZ available on more clusters, definitely within the consortium. We have a couple of HPC centers there that will make an effort to make it available. We'll also start conversations with the admins of the Euro HPC systems to see if we can make it available there, what would we need. And finally, we'll provide training for admins who want to roll this out on their HPC system. Like, you know, what do you need to do in order to make sure that this actually performs also when a couple of hundred nodes are using the software stack. Also for end users, how should you use this as an end user? So then a little bit about what we're working on today and in the near future. So I'll start with the file system layer. On that part, we're trying to get a new start from zero server in place, physical one this time, so we can actually plug a UB key in. This is one of the ways in which we want to improve the security because if you can deploy something on the start from zero, you can deploy it to a lot of systems in the world. So that's a security thing you want to think about. I need to properly secure that. And it's also pretty requisite actually of the certain BMS developers. If you want to be part of their default set of configurations. Oh, I see Ken. It's sort of self involved. Okay, we want to do a good job before we ask them, can we be included there in the set of default configurations. And that will also help us create more impact. Because if we are in the set of default configurations for CVMFS, anyone who installs the CVMFS RPM or WM package, they will also get access to the easy repository. In terms of the compatibility layer, but already hinted at some collaboration here. We've been trying to create a new version of the compatibility layer and issues along the way. This is a script of Gen2 prefix that you do this installation of the compatibility layer was giving some issues for X86 and for ARM that now works as far as I understand. I've not been working on this myself so some of it is a little bit the details are not known to me. But I do know that this comes also from collaboration with the Alliance. I know that but actually looked at the X86 problems. Bob from easy actually looked at the ARM problems. And I think this is, you know, even if we don't use the same compatibility layer, at least we can benefit by working with the same tool. Yeah, just to repeat. Yeah, for the audience back home, Bart remarked that it's also a collaboration with the gentle developers themselves. We have a good connection with them, both the Alliance and easy. And I've seen a big, big push of the past months is the way in which we process community contributions. So this was sort of a slide. This was our aim. We wanted to build this type of pipeline where we have a contributor who says, okay, I want to, you know, deploy a certain software package in easy. And then what, like what kind of review process does that need to go through how do we build that software for the different architectures, etc. You know, step by step, because that's, that's where most of the development has been. So basically the idea is that the contributor first does a full request to the software layer and says, okay, I want to add, you know, this package this easy config. Then there's a reviewer on the bottom left. He checks, you know, if the same is there nothing weird here. Today, he can add the bot build label to the GitHub issue to get a PR. And then it gets picked up by a bot that's running in AWS. This is running in a virtual cluster on AWS and spin up a lot of different types of nodes with different architectures. And those actually do the builds of the software on these different architectures. There'll be thanks in tarbles.  Then the next step, the reviewer can have a look again. Does it still make sense is still okay, you can add the pot deploy label. That means these tarbles get uploaded to the S3 bucket. And again, the book will report back about this step. Oh, I did the uploading. It's now there in the S3 bucket. The first step is a cron job that is running on the start from zero server that is pulling the S3 bucket for new tables. And as soon as they're a new table, they will download it to the start from zero. That will not immediately deployed in the CVMFS environment. So it will not yet be probably available that it will just be on the on the same server. The book will also create a PR to our staging repository. That's easy staging. Again, that gives a reviewer a chance to look at it as a list, which modules are going to be added by this PR. And if the reviewer says, okay, this is fine. Just merge the PR and the cron job on the start from zero sees this PR is now merged. I can now actually ingest it into the CVMFS repository on the start from zero. It will be available to all of the users who have access to the easy software stack. Another thing we've been working on is the GPU support, specifically NVIDIA GPU support. There's a couple of challenges here. Of course, we have to deal with the end user license agreement of FIDA, which does not allow us to redistribute everything that would be in a normal, easy for FIDA module. What we do there is we have a script that checks in the ULA, which files are we allowed to redistribute. Anything we're not allowed to redistribute is replaced by a sim link, which points to a special directory created in easy with the host injections. But this is basically where you put anything as a, as a system admin that should be picked up from the system. So you can put an additional full FIDA SDK at installation there and then it gets picked up from the system. Second challenge is that if you use a very new Cuda library, it doesn't always work with all the drivers. Of course, on the easy side, we don't know what GPU drivers are being used on a certain host. We cannot really help that either, right? But we can make it easier for the host system to support newer versions of FIDA. You can install compatibility liars that increase this compatibility range a little bit. It's still not indefinite, right? But it's a little bit larger range, so we provide a script that makes it easy for you. And again, this is installed in this host injections directory. And the third challenge, and that's one we haven't solved yet, that's still a work in progress, is that easy actually uses a built container for technical reasons that I won't go into. But in the container, we have to mount the Cuda drivers and that by singularity that's mounted in a non-standard location. And that's currently giving some installation, so we need to figure out how to deal with that. Software testing also mentioned before, we actually use reframe. So we have a nice presentation on reframe yesterday. One feature that was mentioned was that you can now specify what the features are that a certain partition supports, right? So we have a lot of requests from us, because basically we want to separate anything that is system-specific into one configuration file, the reframe configuration file. And the tests should be completely, like they should know nothing about the system, right? Because we, the test developers, know nothing about the host system that this is going to run on. So they should look at the configuration file and make some decisions and do something reasonable based on that configuration file. So very simply put, if in the configuration file it says this is a partition that only has CPUs, right? It doesn't have GPUs. You should not generate the reframe GPU test. Similarly, you might have an application where it makes sense to, you know, which pure MPI where it makes sense to typically just fill the node with MPI ranks, you know, one rank per CPU core. And it can take the core count from a reframe configuration file and just fill it up. But these kind of sort of standard things are being done here. We created one blueprint test based on Gromax, because Gromax, well, you know, supports CPUs and supports GPUs. So it was a good use case. It's something we know very well. And we try to make this a blueprint that we can use later to create more portable tests. So all of the system-specific part has been taken out of that Gromax test. We try to generalize it as much as possible with reusable components in there that can also be used in other tests. For example, this, you know, launch one rank per core that you have that can just be a standard function that is probably useful to more tests. And this is actually so trying to make this portable right now it is as portable. I can actually run the same test suite on my own local module stack. That's also easy build. So, you know, the naming is kind of similar. So that helps. But yeah, it shows some of the portability here. And I think part if you guys want to use this, I think it will just work. At least that's what it should do. Question in the back. Yes. No, so. Yeah, so this is a good question in the back. There was a question that reframe tends to also be used to test performance. For now, we're only looking at functionality. We also want to do performance testing. But that is even more difficult to do in a portable way, right? Because what is the expected performance of a Gromax run on a system you don't know. That's going to be a hard problem to solve. So either we do something and make it easy to, I don't know, point to a local database which contains the reference numbers for, you know, what the performance of that test should be, or make an educated guest based on the hardware that is there. It would be another way to go, but then you still need pretty wide threshold, like pretty wide acceptance threshold. Yeah, that is something we haven't, we haven't solved yet. For easy itself, you know, we'll probably have some fixed test infrastructure where we can actually know the performance right and then so we can still test the easy software stack. In general, but if you as an end user want to check, does the easy software stack actually perform as expected on my HPC system. Yeah, what's the reference for that you'll have to put that in yourself one way or another. All right, so some future activities. The bot is not finished working, but we can definitely do some refinements there. One of the things is that, you know, if one of the architectures fills the build right maybe you have seven tar balls and one is missing. You just want to be able to re trigger that one bill that is currently not possible. Also for debugging right now it's kind of a black box right if a contributor says oh I want to build this easy conflict. If the build system gets launched, it starts building the star balls. If something fails along the way, you don't have any way of getting to the law file or to inspect the files that are there.  So what we'll probably do there is provide a downloadable container that gives you the container that was used for building. You can see, you know, all of the law that were there at the time that the bill failed, you can see if you can get it going from there or figure out what the issue was. Also, the software testing is not yet integrated yet as a step in this in this workflow yet, but that is something we'll add. So basically, we want to launch reframe tests probably right after the bill for single node tests. And then in the staging step, we probably want to also run no female test to check if it works before we actually deployed in the production environment. For test week, we're looking to add more level level tests as well. So something like the also test that will definitely be useful. Because yeah, if your grammar fails and it's because of some communication issue. It's nicer if you can just check the communication separately. And now that we have a kind of sensible blueprint, we want to also expand on the amount of high level application test that we have. And as I mentioned, also the other thing you want to look at is how do we do this portable from that is not a soft problem, but we'll just try to see what works. We'll also be looking to expand hardware support. So now we're working on a video GPU support. I think that the sensible start, but we also want to check in the support. In the, in a more distant future, we'll be looking at risk five support. We will also give trainings. So again, this is something from the multi skill project as well. That has a training work package in it. The first end user training will actually be this may already at the event that was already mentioned earlier. That's organized by HPC now, right. And we'll also develop some training material for system administrators that want to host the software stack on their own APC system. So for things, we want to also support extending the easiest software stack with a local stack. So either on a local file system, or it could be your own CVS file system. This can be useful for proprietary software. It will enable you to do faster deployment. You know, the nice thing about easy is that it's going to have a pretty good QA procedure. But what will not be so nice is that it will take a bit of time right review and needs to look at this. And if, you know, if it poses issues if some test fails, you need to look into it, you need to solve it. And maybe you just want to help your user tomorrow, right, then it's nice if you have a local environment where you can just deploy it, whatever the quality insurance is. And then go through the QA of easy to make it available to everybody. Or maybe you just want to support a local software developer, and they just want to deploy development versions of their software on your local system that might be fine, but you don't want to push that into the general easy report. In multi skill will also explore some use cases where we want to see how can we use easy in a CI environment.  So you can have all the dependencies available in less than a minute. So we think it can be helpful in CI environment. And I think, yep, that wraps up the talk. I still have a demo. We have time. Yeah, so basically, if you want to install it, if you have a VM or whatever you can just install see if you invest, and then there's a second step to install the easy configuration. That will eventually be one step. Right. So as soon as we'll become a default configuration to see them as it just you'll install see even that should be enough. Then there's a step to activate the environment so you source a best script and that makes this module environment available to you and then you just load whatever module is in the environment that you want to use. And in this case I want to show you a to note run on our supercomputer. We have the easy environment available. We actually did not put proper caching in place yet. So one of the things you see right now it should not be a problem because it's actually cashed locally on the note. But the first time I'm on a new note and I do a module AV takes quite a long time because there's no proper caching in between. That's one of the things we want to explain in this system training like how do you set that up right how do you make sure that this feels like a local file system or network file system. So what you see here on the top I did an age top command on both of the notes that are involved in this job. This will take a minute. So if there are questions, we can cover the questions down and then hopefully by the end we'll see the results. Yes. Wait, do we do microphone or I repeated. Okay. So right now it's just, you know, two hands full of software that's it. It's not all about completeness yet. It's like we need to have this proper community contribution procedure in place. It needs to be pretty well automated because we expect more and more contributions will come in and if you start too early. You'll just be working on processing those community contributions rather than working on the automation. So we want to make sure that we're ready to process a larger volume of these. We don't understand well enough, you know, how do we, one of the things we're still deciding on is how much do we put in the compatibility layer that takes some experience to figure out what works what doesn't work. You don't want to make these bigger changes later on when you already have an enormous software stack deployed and a lot of people are relying on it. Now it's much easier for us to just decide. Okay. Next iteration, the compatibility layer is going to look completely different. Nobody cares. They know it's a pilot. Are you going to organize support? Are you a central organization? True. Oh, so the question is, how will we organize support for this, right? Because the local site, well, they know their system, but they don't necessarily know how the software was deployed and the other way around. The person who deployed the software in easy doesn't know local system. Yeah, that is tricky. That's true. But then I think we are in the end one community. So we can, I think the way we have to do this is to keep talking to each other. If we all work on the easy software stack like, I'll be back. Yeah. So yeah, so the question was on support, right? In the coming years, we have to know the skill project and well, I mean, our primary focus for support will be the other scientific work packages within the project. But anytime we have left, we're more than willing to spend on the community, because that's also where we learn, right? We learn what works and what doesn't work. But yeah, well, we'll have to talk to the system to understand the local system. So the question is, are the packages going to be exclusively installed by easy build or is this going to be our last easy build user meeting? I don't know if it's going to be exclusively by easy build for the foreseeable future. I think so. Again, since that is what most of us in the easy project have experienced with. But if there's somebody who says, look, you know, I have spec experience. I think he's great, but it should support spec. Yeah, I mean, we're very open to have that discussion and to see how we can support it. I don't think easy build will ever go away from me. I don't see that happening. No, I mean, so easy is not replacing easy build. Indeed, as I said, you know, you might have reasons to still install stuff locally. If you want to tune installations, if you want to use slightly different versions, if you want to use a development version. There's still plenty of reasons to want some form of local tech, right? And there you probably still want to use easy build as well. If you already have everything in your local stack, there's no added benefit, right? But that means you have to maintain a pretty big stack. Maybe, I think, I think the benefit of easy is that all of the standard stuff, you can probably use it from easy software stack. If you want something very specific, you'll probably install it locally. Yeah. This is too long story to repeat. Yeah. So one of the issues we currently see a lot with easy build is somebody comes up with an easy config file, works for them. Maybe it even works on another system they tested it on. On the third system, it doesn't work, right? Because of slash temp being mounted differently, not big enough. OS dependencies that are missing or extra stuff that's installed in the US that's accidentally picked up. So all of these, all of these things that different the build environment cost trouble. In easy, that's way more control because we have a very controlled build environment. We're basically all working in the same operating system in some extent. So I think that's going to make sharing installations and getting stuff to work a lot easier. And once someone has done it once, the other people just use it, right? They don't need to reinstall and make sure it works for them. That's a key difference. Yeah. So our marker from the audience is that it will work the same way everywhere, the same physical installation, right? This is 99% true. There are still different optimizations, right? And we have seen in the past, not within easy, but in other cases that optimizations can sometimes change the runtime behavior. Your code. Some bugs are specific to a VX 512 optimization, for example. So this can still happen, right? But in principle, yeah, they're built in exactly the same way. Numerical. Yeah. It's going to happen for everyone. That's true. Yeah. Yeah.  This is a difficult one. When is it done enough? That's always a challenge. To play with it is definitely good enough. Yes. Would it work in such an environment? So the question is, is it already worth trying to see if this works on my system, right? And in this case, the particular system with some security things in place, and you want to know, does it work there? Yes, it's definitely worth giving it a try already. It's not something that I would just give to users and say, you know, this is production ready. Go ahead. The module is there. Have fun. If you have more technically interested users, right, who are into software development themselves and they like something new and they want to give it a try. Sure. But yeah, not just for regular production run yet. There's like a getting started part in documentation that explains you how to get access. Either a native installation of CVFS or using our easy client container and then how to run the demos like very close to what customers show. It's definitely ready for that. And yeah, please try it out and let us know if you run into any problem. Anything that any problems that are raised now, we can be aware of and try to fix it in the next iteration. That's sort of the reason why we, there's multiple reasons we have this pilot repository. One is to show to ourselves that we can do it like what the Canadians have been doing. That's one thing. Another thing is to let other people play with it. But it was also a way to actually get funding and tell whoever was listening to us like we can do this. We have a handful of software and getting the software and it's not going to be the biggest problem for the automation community. This is an excellent question. So policy is something that we still have to decide on. I mean, it will be great. Right. If we have a reframe. Oh, sorry, repeat the question. Yes. So the question was for community contributions. Do we need a reframe test for all of the community. And yeah, so I mean, it will be great in the ideal world. I would say yes, this is a hard requirement. But that also makes it a very big barrier for people to contribute. Certainly they need to know easy built because they need to create an easy conflict. If it's not there yet, they need to know reframe. And they need to know the particular way that we do portable testing. Not the standard. So that is, I can imagine that's quite tricky. So I think it's more realistic to say, we'll try to stimulate it as much as we can and make it very transparent. Which software is actually tested with reframe tests and which isn't make kind of a support matrix and visualize that. I think it will go in that direction, but you know, the jury is still out on it. There's a question. There's a question in Slack as well from, it's a funny one because it's from Thomas who's involved. He's asking there's lots of development activities, but how about activities to put in easy to easy to use any plans on rolling it out to end users. Good question. Any plan? Well plan and in Gantt it's already easy is already mounted. So it's available if people know what they can play with. And that's the case I think in some Norwegian systems as well. I think it's the case at surf as well. If you know it's there, you can play with it. You can probably ask support for questions and they're going to be annoyed if you do. We actually also have a cloud environment at surf. And we're also going to roll it out there. So there that will just get a template VM that has the easy stack mounted and give it a try. I personally, I would if I see a reviewer coming along on our system that I think your technical, you know, you could find this interesting. I would like to give people a nice to give it a try and see how it goes. And I think we should also organize because we think that this makes it much easier to move from one system to another. We should really try to do that, like ask a user, have your use case on your local SPC cluster, see how much time it takes. You can now move to our system with or without easy. So that is something, you know, I've in the back of my head, but I still have to find the right user.


Hi guys, this is Assa Singhal and here are entrepreneurs for things to know beyond India. Indians aspiring to work in the US can now sign relief. Donald Trump has proposed a new immigration policy that would prioritize merit over family ties while giving green cards to foreigners. Jeff Bezos is upping his investment gain. In a bid to ensure faster delivery, the entrepreneur has invested $1.5 billion in Amazon's 3 million square feet air hub. Carlos Ghosn has taken away Nissan's happy days. After his dismissal, the Japanese car maker has hit a rock bottom with the decline of 50 net profits as compared to the previous fiscal year. The world now has a new Everest champion. Nepal's mountaineer Kami Rita Sherpa has become the first person to climb to the top of the Mount Everest for 23 times.


I knew it was fair, but I'm just taking back to my best I had against him yesterday and after I had two strikes he threw me that fastball so I was prepared for this time after he threw me the curve ball in the dirt so I was ready for it this time and that's why my reaction was like that. And the second row right aisle. Didi Aaron said yesterday your final at bat the walk you had was huge for you did you take away anything from that did that give you any momentum going into today? I mean not really but I mean as soon as you get on base it's something used for the whole team you know that's all we try to do all these games just go out there and win and that's all we try to do and but it's a good step for me I'm a dribbler thing I think was the one that actually put it out there for me. Seated on the right Didi. Didi how impressed are you with your team's ability to capitalize with runners on scoring position compared to last year where it seemed to be a struggle? Last year is last year you know every year we focus on trying to get better and that's one of the things we always talked about with runners scoring position and that's the thing to help you win the game so I think that's what the team has been doing the whole year around and it's always bring the next guy up. Didi just like at first glance did you think that ball was like fair or foul is that what you were looking at or did you know immediately? No I knew it was fair. And what's it been like for you these last you know I think month and a half you know what work have you been doing to try to break out of you know. I've been doing the same work I've been doing since I got here I didn't try to change anything just you know try to swing at strikes that's one thing for me right now and be patient and I'm just all over the place swinging almost every ball so that's a thing that's one thing and be aggressive but in the strikes when that's what I'm trying to do right now. And Pete to your right Didi. Didi you've been out there for a number of Tanaka's postseason starts at shortstop is there just another level you see that he takes his game up when he's in the postseason setting. Oh yeah definitely I mean it takes it even on a better level know just what he's having a good year and like in big moments he just comes in so calm and gets on the mound you barely get any reaction of him that's what you want to see from a starter so that's a that's really great job he's composed and he's ready to go always when when is this time. And Ken in the first row. Didi you pride yourself on blocking out all the outside noise and forgetting what happened yesterday looking forward has all have your philosophy has been challenged by this slump you've had. Slump that I mean I mean everybody goes through ups and down but your confidence level always got to stay up so for me just focus on my job and try to get better that's the only thing I can do. I mean people always going to say say something if you do good or bad so for me it just go out there play the ball and try to get better. Didi what's the feeling like to hit a grand slam in a playoff game particularly in a big spot like that. What's the feeling. I mean it's a great feeling to come to come back for the team and but the best thing is just getting the W that's that's what we always focus on. And like I said in the beginning that's all we want is it want to get you know get a W I got eight more 10 more nine more to go. So that's what we want. So just keep going to go on to the plane tonight with everybody in the offense really in these two games having contributed so far. How much of a boost is that moving forward in the series. Now that just shows you what this team can do. You know we're not just relying on one person is the group has always been together top two bottles doing damage. So if I don't if I don't do it today or if I can do it right now and there's a bad guy behind me I got they got enough trust in him that he's going to do the job anyway. So it's so it's always been like that for us. Anything else for D.D. on the second row. What's this group's mindset being up to. Oh I know you guys you know hyper focus on each individual game chance to make it a quick series. What does that mean to you guys.  We don't want to think so far ahead. You know it's taking a one game at a time and control control on that situation and go from there.


I remember once as a boy, my dad took me camping. At first I was excited to be spending a whole week out in the woods, but two days in I was sick of fishing and the batteries in my Game Boy had run completely dry. The third day I told my dad I wanted to go back to camp and play in the clearing around our tent. He looked worried about it at first, but after pestering him for about an hour, I warmed down and he let me take the five minute hike back to camp. We were from the city, and so much of this was new to me. Without my dad rushing me along to get to the river, that five minute hike got a lot longer as I got distracted by every cool plant, bug, and animal I walked by. I strayed from the path a couple times to check something out, but after I almost got lost for the second time, I decided to cut to the chase and just get back to camp. When I found the tent, I was immediately glad dad was still fishing, because if he wasn't, there wouldn't be anything to eat. Something had slipped into the tent while we were gone and swiped all the food we'd brought from our supply bags, but don't worry, they left my dead batteries right where they were. I cleaned up the best I could, zipped the tent closed, and went back to my regularly scheduled exploring. I don't remember how long I was rooting in the dirt looking for bugs, but I eventually noticed a little red fluff out of the corner of my eye. When I turned to look, what was staring back at me was a baby red fox laying on its paws and twitching its tail. I put my hand out toward it and made a clicking sound. I'm not sure what I wanted it to do, maybe smell my hand or something. When I moved though, it stood and turned away from me and looked back in my direction. I stood up too, and it started trotting calmly into the woods. After a few seconds, it paused and turned back to look at me. I took a step toward it, and it turned and started prancing away again with me a few paces behind. After a few moments, the dense wood started to thin a bit, and the foxes pace quickened and eventually I found myself running to keep up as it darted around ahead of me. We ran through paths and up the river. The trees passed by in a blur and I sprinted to keep up. We climbed a hill so steep that from the top I could see the canopy of trees we were just walking under moments before. That's when I realized how far we were from camp, so far that I couldn't see our clearing even from this high up. As impressed as I was with the view, the reality of my situation had begun to sink in. I had no idea where I was, and the only one who knew the way back was the fox and it was still trying to lead me in the other direction. I turned slowly back towards the fox, still out of breath from the climb up that hill. Before I could find it though, I spotted something else, another boy peering out from behind a tree. Hello? I said. He stared at me for a while, wide eyed and still as a statue. Hello back? He said, not moving from behind his tree. Did you scare the fox off? I asked, fearful I'd never make it back to camp without the fox to lead me. No, the boy said. He's right here. He still didn't move, didn't point anywhere. I looked all around, but I didn't spot the fox. How old are you? I asked after a while. The silence got awkward for a moment as he refused to answer. I'm nine, I said, hoping he'd say something back. I'm the same. Oh, that's cool. Do you live around here? I took a step toward him, but as soon as I moved, he retreated back behind his tree. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. I'm not going to hurt. It's okay. He interjected. I just don't see many people this far into the woods. His footsteps made no noise as he moved out from behind the tree into full view. I'm Ena. He said with a confidence that was a complete departure from his earlier demeanor. Ena, that sounds like a girl's name. Not where I'm from. He sassed back. Where are you from? I pressed again. Hmm. He paused. I guess it's a lot like this place just a long time ago. Confused, I followed up. How'd you get here?  I ate so many of them that I needed a nap. When I woke up, the big box was on a big boat and when the boat landed again, I got off and I've been here ever since. So you just live in the woods? He shrugged.  I run, he replied. I dig up bugs. Sometimes I hunt birds. I sleep in the sun and bathe in the lake and when people come camping, I like to play pranks on them and if I'm lucky, they'll have sweets to swipe. I laughed. Are there any cool places around here you could show me? Somehow I'd forgotten I needed to find my way back to camp and went right back into exploration mode. He turned and started walking a few paces before pausing to look back at me. When I started to move toward him, he took off running and I ran following behind.  He showed me the most beautiful spiderweb he knew of in a rabbit hole so big I could almost crawl in myself. When he couldn't think of anything else to show me, we played chase in the woods. After a few hours, I started to get hungry and remembered that I needed to get back before my dad realized I'd left camp. Do you know the way back to the clearing near the river? I asked Ina. He stopped cold and looked back at me over his shoulder with a frown. What would you want to go back there for? Up here there's nothing to worry about and no one to tell you what to do. Why can't you stay? I've had so much fun up here with you, but my dad, almost like a spell had been broken as soon as I mentioned him, I could hear my dad calling my name in the distance. My ears perked up and I reeled in the direction of his voice. A few seconds later he emerged from the forest and I ran into his arms, suddenly realizing how worried I had been that I was lost. We're going to talk about this when we get home. He said sternly, what have you been doing way out here? I've been playing with my friend. I turned to find Ina, but he was nowhere in sight. Dear friend, my dad asked. He was around here. I nodded. He was over. I reached out to the point I noticed the fox peeking his head out from a hole in the base of a tree. We stood there for a moment, waiting to see what the fox would do. Stay here, dad said as he stepped towards the tree. The fox retreated back into the hole as my dad knelt down beside it. Then my dad spoke in a voice he'd never used before, flat and silky smooth and in a language I couldn't recognize. Somehow the fox seemed to understand. It peaked back out of the hole as he spoke and then came cautiously out completely and sat down looking up at my dad, seemingly as entranced as I was. I couldn't make out a single word, but my dad kept speaking and the fox kept looking up at him, occasionally nodding attentively before eventually getting up and bounding back into the forest and out of sight. Dad sighed somberly and stood up. Alright, let's start back. He said, we've got a good two-day hike ahead of us before we can get back to civilization. I froze, two days, wasn't I only gone for a few hours? You have to be careful with foxes, he said, ignoring my question after a long pause. They're smart and not always well-intentioned.  Time passed and he's always refused to talk about that time I got lost. To this day I don't even know how he found me. We went camping several times after that and every single time a fox would visit and beckon from the edge of camp but I learned my lesson. Now I have a boisterous son of my own who loves the outdoors even more than I ever did. Yesterday I told my dad we were planning a camping trip. There was a long silence before he said, we need to talk. I stared at him as he continued, I think by now you've already guessed that the boy you met that time in the forest was no boy at all. I nodded, but he's not exactly a fox either. He took a deep breath. My part in this story played out when I was just a boy myself but Ina has been bound to our family since long before that. So you know his name too, I asked. I do. I know him well. My father had no taste for war and he wasn't ashamed of it. He started. When he got drafted we fled our home and hid deep in the woods not far from where I found you that day. Your grandpa told us how he used to play in that area when he was young and he knew it would be far from prying eyes. At first we just slept in a tent but over the coming weeks grandpa slowly built a small hovel with a single room and a thatched roof all by hand. It wasn't comfortable but we had what we needed to survive and grandpa was safe far from the swamps his friends were dying in. I spent a lot of time with my dad learning how to set up snares and catch fish, what kind of plants to look for and how to build a fire without matches but I think it became obvious after a while how lonely I was with just my parents and nature to keep me company. Until one day my dad brought a boy back to our camp, Ena. I muttered. He nodded back, Ena. I only saw the fox that day I found you but if I had to guess I'd bet he looked exactly the same the day I met him as when you did. Kids soon age very slowly and on their time scale he's still likely very young they also have a lot of control over the appearance of their human form the face that he uses is intentional. I looked at my dad confused I'll get there. He said. After that day, Ena and I were rarely apart. I didn't know what he was right away and it didn't make sense that my dad would bring this kid to our home when we were supposed to be hiding but I didn't question it. Years went by in our little home every day I'd pick a random direction and venture out into the woods and every day I'd find Ena without even trying. I thought I had some superpower but eventually things started to make more sense. The day he took me to meet his mom. His mom he made it seem like he was alone when he stowed away on that ship. I interrupted. There never was any ship. He was born here. He probably just didn't want you to know. I guess I shouldn't be surprised he lied to me. It's not like he was nine years old at the time either. I told you they're clever. I chuckled and shook my head. So what happened with his mother? She kind of blindsided me. Ena was showing me to this new section of the forest that I hadn't explored and then suddenly there was just another person. It had been a couple of years since I'd seen anyone other than Ena or my parents so I was shocked and a little terrified that we were going to be found out and my dad would be taken away. But then she spoke. Her voice was flat and smooth and when she spoke it felt like her words were penetrating deep into your mind. She was impressively tall but had a calming presence despite her imposing stature. She told me her name was Suki and asked if I was the boy her Ena had been playing with in a way that implied she already knew the answer. I nodded and she smiled back and came towards me with noiseless footsteps.  She put one hand on my shoulder, gazed into my eyes, pressed her thumb into my forehead and suddenly I was somewhere else, a meadow I didn't know on a sunny day. I was so tall now I looked down and saw Ena holding my hand but it wasn't my hand and it wasn't Ena. He was identical but somehow I just knew it wasn't him. Then I blinked and it was night time. I was sitting next to a fire, the boy was there too but he was older now and I realized how much he looked like me. We were eating berries and laughing while two fish roasted on sticks leaning near the flame. There was a warmth in his laughter that was so disarming and in that moment I felt full and complete. I blinked again and that feeling was gone and so was he. Ena was there with me now but I felt alone. The fire was dying out and I was getting tired. Ena and I laid down next to the embers and I closed my eyes and when I woke I was myself again. Alone and in a thicket I didn't recognize but I somehow still felt like I knew where I was. I tried to get up but my body didn't listen and I started to panic. The sensation of it was strange. I could feel my body as if everything was completely normal but I couldn't move a single muscle. Then she spoke but this time it came from inside my mind. She told me to relax and that she was going to be with me for a while. She said she wouldn't hurt me but every once in a while she would need to take control and in return she would share as much of her wisdom with me as my human mind could hold. As soon as she finished talking she let go of her control and I was able to move again. For months after that I'd leave our camp every day under the pretext of playing with Ena. But as soon as I was out of sight I'd black out and wake up hours later in a remote part of the forest I'd never seen before. Somehow I always knew the way back home and she never left me with so much as a bruise. Did you ever find out what happened during those blackouts? I interjected. He paused for a moment and continued on ignoring my question. She kept up her end of the bargain though. It was like being wired directly into the universe. If I wanted to know what the pyramids look like when they'd just been built I could close my eyes and I was there. If I focused I could see my parents thoughts or even the thoughts of people I'd never met on the other side of the planet. The drawback was that she wasn't just an open book for me to look through. I had to know exactly what it was I wanted to know. As a kid it didn't occur to me to ask about the secrets of the universe or the meaning of life. But the one thing I did want to know was who was that boy in the visions and what did he have to do with me? For this she spoke and told me briefly a story she said was too painful for her to relive. It was my grandfather in the vision. The boy with Ena's face was my grandfather. His parents were drunks and abusive so one day when he was still a child he slipped out the window at night and vanished into the woods. Suki watched him closely from a distance while he wandered in search of food. When he eventually collapsed for the night she conjured a flame to keep him warm. This went on for days before she finally decided to take him in and care for him. She told me that she'd never realized how alone she'd felt before and that the years that followed were like a dream with him by her side and eventually as he grew their friendship turned to love and that love in turn bore fruit. They named him Ena after her father and for a while they were happy. That happiness wasn't destined to last though. My grandfather wasn't as lucky as my father when war came for his generation and he was called on to take up arms far from his home, far from Suki. Suki waited for him with unwavering loyalty but when he returned he'd fallen in love with another woman, a nurse he met abroad and they had a child together, my father. In her jealousy Suki fled into the woods and my grandfather never saw her again but no matter how hard she tried she couldn't keep Ena away from his brother and eventually me, both me and my father grew up with Ena in our lives. So why didn't I? I asked with envy. It was a request from Suki. The day she left me she asked that I be the one to finally sever ties with her and Ena so that she could move past the pain of my grandfather's betrayal. If I agreed she said she'd leave me with some knowledge that I'd find useful as I got older. Among that knowledge was God's tongue, the language you heard me speak that day. And after that she was gone. I never saw her or Ena again, aside from that time he led you into the woods and I lost all access to Suki's abilities. That's why we set up camps so far from where Ena eventually led you. I was hoping we'd be outside of his territory. I don't think anywhere is outside his territory. I chimed in. I saw a fox like him trying to lead me away every time we went camping even when we were nowhere nearby. Yes, he was always strong-willed. That's why Suki had such a hard time keeping him away from us. So wouldn't you tell him that day in the God's tongue? I told him that I missed him. I thanked him for his company growing up and to tell his mother I was sorry for intruding. We sat quietly and I stared at the floor as I thought through the story my dad had finally shared with me. So what should I do? I asked him. Well, if you go into the woods, Ena will probably show up, especially if you bring kids with you. So you'll have to keep your wits about you and make sure that boy never leaves your sight. So that's it. That's the story that I've been waiting my whole life to hear. That boy in the woods that day was my grandfather's half-brother. The way my dad avoided the question about his blackouts makes me uneasy though. I think he knows what she was using him for but I don't know why he'd hide it. I'm supposed to take my son camping this weekend but I'm not sure if I should anymore. Maybe I'll go by myself and maybe I'll have a conversation with Ena on my own.


Hey, this is Joel. I'm in my front yard today. It's lovely in Colorado. Things have cooled off a bit since we're getting into deep September. And today, I want to talk a little bit about these hybrid hazelnuts that I grow. There's really no other nut that most of us northern gardeners can grow, but this hybrid hazelnut that is a three-way hybrid between the European or Turkish hazel, the North American hazel, and the Beaked Hazel has done really well for me here on the Front Ranger Colorado. I'd like to show you how. But you need to see the nuts, right? That's what it's all about. So first, I wanted to show you, here's what hazelnuts, these hybrid hazelnuts look like in their husk hanging on the tree. I mentioned it's late September. This is about when they ripen up late September, maybe early October. But here, you can see the hazelnuts in the husk, but the husk is starting to dry down and de-hiss and show us the actual nuts inside. And then, just a view of a couple of the actual nuts themselves. You'll notice these are a little bit smaller than the hazelnuts you might buy at the grocery store, which are mostly produced in Oregon, because they are a different species, but they are very high quality, very tasty, and they actually have a higher content of hazelnut oil. I mentioned that this is a hybrid hazelnut. Let me explain a little bit what I mean by that. The hazelnut or the filbert that most people are familiar with, certainly the one I grew up stuff in my face with, is a species called Coralus Avalana, and it's native to Europe and Asia Minor, what we call turkey these days. That variety, that species, you can't grow successfully here. There's a disease and also some climatic problems, but we've got two North American native varieties that don't have either the climate or the disease problem. That's the beaked hazelnut, Coralus Cornuta, and the American hazelnut, Coralus Americana. Both of them produce reliably, just real small nuts and not very many of them. So by hybridizing those three species into this resulting shrub, we get good nuts of a good size with reliable production. Now let me show you one of the things that's totally different about this than the standard hazelnut. There's an absence of a big old trunk here. Your standard hazelnut, European hazel tree is a tree with a proper trunk. This here is a shrub with lots of canes. So instead of having one trunk and then pruning the branches up high like we would do on the European hazel, here the pruning to keep your shrub producing nuts well every single year indefinitely is to look inside at the different canes. You can see by both their diameter and their bark texture, this is an older cane. This one's about seven or eight years old. This one here is in its second year. This one is in its first year. Here's a third year cane. So the idea is each of these canes has about a 10-year lifespan. When a given cane reaches 10 years, you go right down to the bottom by the ground. You saw it out. That leaves a little bit more space in here and the younger generations of canes fill that in and they all are producing well for you and they basically become old-timers at age 10 and it's time to take them out. But the crown of the plant and the root system is going to live for you indefinitely. Okay, so previously we were looking at a different hazelnut shrub in the front yard of my house. Now we're in the backyard and I wanted to show you one of the other shrubs because it's really important that everybody understand the genetics of the hazelnut crop in production is a little bit complicated. And so whereas you may be familiar with apple trees, plum trees, etc. that need to have one pollinator variety, hazelnuts, especially these hybrid hazelnuts, turns out they need to have several or more pollinator varieties nearby. And so what I've been doing is growing a whole bunch of related but genetically unique sibling plants essentially so that they can cross pollinate each other. So just taking a look at this one here, you can see that because they're siblings and they're not clones of one another, this is the same age as the other one we were looking at. But differences you'll see. This one is shorter. It's a little bit broader. It's also getting its full color earlier. And whereas the other one ripened up all its nuts about a week ago, this one still has all of its nuts on. Not a single one has dropped on the ground yet, but they will in about a week's time. Also this one makes slightly larger nuts. That one makes more but slightly smaller nuts. So let's look at a close-up here of this branch that still got all of its nuts on it. And one of the things that's so fun about perennial horticulture is that while we're still waiting for this year's crop to ripen, if you see all these little kind of whitish structures here, those are the male flowers or catkins that are going to bloom next March. And so the tree, the bush is getting next year's crop ready while it's ripening up this year's crop. And then if you look at these little kind of football-shaped white-tipped buds, those are where the female flowers are going to emerge from. They're an unusual flower in that they're referred to as naked, meaning there are no petals, there are no sepals, there's no male parts, there's just a female pistil emerges from here. It's actually a really cool looking red filament. So those will emerge in March just in time to receive pollen, but not from here. It needs pollen from one of the other siblings that is genetically distinct.