[Beowulf] Cloud / HPC

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

> - new found obsessive interest in these things they call "skymiles" #
> chieftravelingofficer

[/sigh] All my flights are to/from NY (with a few to London, and other 
places), so If I do 50 of those flights, I can just barely hit the 
lowest mileage level for upgrades.


- A new application for computing ( a version of the traveling salesman or knapsack problem) is to determine the optimum mile acquisition strategy including working out code shares (Turkish Airways, I hear), open-jaw tickets, strategic one-stop flights rather than non-stop. Then there's the approach of reserving flights that you know are going to be oversold, so when you volunteer to be bumped, they can compensate you in something valuable to you (miles) that is free for them.  You also have to be aware of which miles are just miles, and which ones are "status qualifying" miles.  And of course you have a screen scraping problem for data ingest, because the terms of all these programs are continuously changing.  Perhaps not in HFT sense, but there's no question that fares and miles change on a day to day basis.