4 Weeks in the Philippines

Epilogue: 4 days in El Nido

Day 25: Closing Ceremony

Our last day at IRRI. A hugely successful, thoroughly exhausting day. Here are the highlights:

Unscheduled meeting with the Deputy Director General of Research, Jackie Hughes – she had just returned from India and had zero time, her secretary assured me. I insisted, and harassed, and managed to get 30 mins. As the leader of the research organization, she was thrilled at the Big Data team’s work in support of the scientists. This impromptu chat was just an hour before our…

Closing Ceremony - the auditorium sat 200 people. I was “volunteered” by the other IBMers to give a short speech on behalf of the team (I was not present when they decided/schemed this). I wasn’t nervous at all…

Big Data presentation - the final presentations were just 20 mins for each team. Our big data team went last. It was a bit of a blur, but I remember getting big applause at the one moment I was hoping for: the big reveal of a signed contract. It was fun.

Press conference - 5 Filipino media outlets came to cover the event, including the Manila Bulletin. The first question was about big data.

Started the day with some good news: the new collaboration agreement between ASTI and the C4 Rice Project was signed.

Then, sat down for a 1:1 chat with the Deputy Director of IRRI, Bruce Tolentino. He was extremely supportive of the new ASTI-IRRI partnership, and would commit the full power of his office to nurturing the partnership, particularly in the areas of communications where support was sorely needed. This provided the management endorsement that was a crucial element.

Day 22: Final Week

We went back to Quezon City with a contract in hand, to ask the Director of ASTI to sign it.

The contract was for a new collaboration between ASTI and the C4 Rice Project (the thing that inspired me back on Day 4), and would commit 200+ processing cores to the project. That’s 13x the power they had available in house, and could dramatically accelerate scientific research.

The Director bought into the mission of the project, and was excited about the role they could play. In fact, he talked about expanding the partnership, increasing collaboration through cross-appointed faculty, and generally deepening the relationship.

We got a win today.

One of the biggest challenges to using cloud computing was slow data connections (Philippines is 155th country in the world, in terms of internet speed). If we were going to forge a robust partnership with ASTI (the government supercomputer), we needed to fix this.

So we called together experts from the government, IRRI IT, network engineers, and research tech admins. 7 guys.

They started working at 9:30am. Upload speed was 6 MB/s.

Our goal was at least 15 MB/s. That would be enough for scientists to upload 1 TB of data in 1 day -- this was the minimum needed for research.

So 7 guys sat around a table for a few hours, surrounded by laptops and scribbled network drawings. Lots of frantic phone calls were made to engineers, to run tests and configure servers. A bit of mild political pressure was exerted on some resource owners. Lots of favors were called in. 

Work finished at 4pm, and we knocked it out of the park. Upload speed was 63 MB/s.

Day 13 and 14: Miracle Weekend

First off, there was a typhoon warning. The forecast was 85% torrential rain every hour. There was ZERO chance of a nice weekend.

Still, the IBM team bravely (recklessly?) set out Friday night for the beach. Forecasts be damned, we were going to make the best of it -- we travelled with raincoats, umbrellas, magazines, and boardgames.

And then a miracle happened.

There was maybe an hour or two of rain. All weekend. And we did everything. Some highlights:

Bioluminsecent night swimming - we dove into the ocean as soon as we arrived at 10pm. ("this might be our only chance”, we thought). And as we moved around, tiny sparks shot through the water around us. Completely unexpected.

Hours of snorkelling - I tried to teach myself how to freedive. Mild success.

Hours of kayaking -- I got caught in the one hour of heavy rain, which turned out to be awesome. Waves added some excitement and challenge, but was never unsafe (I saw a group of filipino senior citizens splashing around as I battled the waves nearby)

Day 9: Drones for Science!

Our team has finished the “data gathering/interview phase”, so there aren’t as many meetings this week. We’re working “headsdown”.