Supercomputing 2007 NASA prank

From Pirates@Home

Several members of the I2U2 develoment team attended "Supercomputing 2007", held in the Reno/Sparks Convention Center in Reno, Nevada, from November 10th through the 15th. Activities included several presentations as a part of the Education Program, setting up and manning a display table which was a part of the booth hosted by Fermilab, and pulling a prank on NASA.

The NASA booth

NASA is into supercomputing in a big way, and so as you might expect their exhibit booth was large. In fact, it took up an entire "block" on the exhibit floor. Each corner of the block had a display for a different NASA activity, along with other displays and activity space in between the corners and inside the block. It was quite a complex. A large lighted balloon with the NASA logo hung over the booth so that you could see the location from afar.

One side of the NASA booth, however, was a little plain compared to the others. It was simply a wall with a big poster on display, and two doors to storage areas. After all, they do need a place to stash their coats and their supplies.

The doors also had posters on them, but they still looked a bit out of place. One was marked "Personnel Room", while the other was marked "Storage".

The prank

Two doors, on the "back" of the booth, spaced apart like that.... I just had to pull this prank. Something inside me screamed every time I walked by. So I went out to an Office Depot not far from the Convention Center and bought a pair of standardized rest room signs and some sticky mounting squares. That was the easy part.

Since the doors already had signs on them we decided that we needed some kind of spacer to make the new signs stand off from the door enough that they would hang straight down over the existing signs. My colleague Mihael roamed the exhibit floor and came back with some Integrated Circuits being given out as favors at some other booth. So we glued those to the back of the rest room signs, at the top, and then put sticky squares on those for the mounting points. Everything was assembled beforehand for quick deployment.

Next we scouted out the location from the booth across the way. Although this was the "back" side of the NASA booth there were still NASA staff wandering around, and we didn't want any of them to see what we were going to do. It took a while. We ended up listening to the sales pitch about the blade servers sold by the guys at the other booth. It sounded like they were pretty good. We showed the signs to the salesman and told him we were really just waiting for the chance to put them up on the NASA booth. He didn't mind. Then the opportunity finally presented itself and we glided over and quickly stuck the signs up.

We were hoping that they would not discover the signs right away, while other people walking by would notice. But the NASA guys discovered the signs pretty quickly and took them down. Then after a bit they seemed to warm to the idea and they put them back up. It was the last day of the conference, so maybe they were in a lighter mood.

So the signs stayed up for the rest of the day. Eventually even some of the NASA guys were taking pictures of it, and taking pictures of each other "coming out of the Women's room".

Next year in Austin

In the end when they took their booth down they brought the signs back to us. Big mistake. I've got them stashed in my luggage already. Next year's Supercomputing conference is in Austin. My guess is that NASA will use substantially the same booth design (they have a lot invested in it). My guess is that by then I can find something much more sticky than 3M sticky squares...