Chapter 16: Admin

Lynn had no idea where Rose had found computing resources at short notice but she’d made a brief call to her uncle Matt earlier and now Lynn had a secure terminal that took her ‘Duke of Packerton’ project code and ran a local optimisation pass with a promising turn of speed. It took them a while to set up all the parameters and the lecture schedule for the current and next semesters.

“Where did you get the schedule for next semester. I didn’t think they came out till the week before?”

Lynn asked.

“They don’t,”

Rose said,

“but that’s only in case they’re late finalising them. They’re usually done by the midterm before and they just sit on the college system until the publishing date.”

That didn’t really explain how Rose knew where to find it but Lynn fed it into this server, called ‘Gregg’ of all things, and it got collated, cross checked and integrated with the other data almost instantly. Good, Gregg was quick.

“How long do we have Gregg for?”

Lynn was concerned that this must be costing Rose a fortune. Rose might be rich and all but it was her code and if they hit an edge case she hadn’t accounted for, this could run for weeks. Rose might get a bill even she couldn’t pay. Certainly one she would be very unhappy about.

“As long as we need but it shouldn’t take all day. Gregg won’t dedicate everything to it. He always prioritises power management, and security of course.”

Rose clearly knew this system. Whatever it was. Lynn took a breath and committed the job. She nearly got up and left it but decided to have a look at the live trace. It wouldn’t slow things down much and only while she was looking at it. The screen filled with charts and graphs. She ran her eyes over them. Every system was a little different and she had to read the chart keys and wrap her head around the layout. Those were giga ... no peta-flops. Thousands of peta-flops.