Day 4 began at a glorious 6am in the morning when Kyla and I woke up. Us, along with Hanna and Mikey unsuccessfully attempted to rent U-bikes to go on a morning bike ride and settled for a 3 mile walk along the river. We saw a bunch of crabs, fish, turtles, and birds, as well as a beautiful view of the city skyline and river. We met a man who was walking one of his 1100 5k’s for love and he posted a nice video of us on instagram!
We next headed to a small restaurant to get some coffee and a traditional Taiwanese breakfast, which was actually SO good. Then we did some more walking around the Dihua district, as well as a little window shopping. On our way home, Jenn, Hanna, and I got a little lost underground looking for the MRT, but we managed to find it eventually (after walking a couple more miles…). We also stopped to get coffee/tea at Fong Da, which was recommended to us by Professor Chen. I got black tea which was super delish.
At 1pm we regrouped and headed to a technology expo that had a large number of companies showing off their technology products. We spent the majority of our time at Gigabyte, the company that hosted us, learning about what they have been designing and why. I was astonished to learn that data centers have grown from using up about 1% of the world’s energy to 2-5%, which to me seems like a lot of energy. This increase in energy consumption/usage leads to more heat and the need for more efficient methods of cooling for CPUs. A lot of the technology shown to us by Gigabyte was cooling techniques such as direct liquid cooling systems (DLC) and immersion tanks, which are theoretically the most effective method. On a different note, I also found it interesting how Gigabyte first started out producing mainly motherboards and has now grown to become an enterprise business.
The day ended with a fun evening of shrimp fishing! I found the actual fishing part to be super fun, yet was a little hesitant when we cooked the shrimp and some of them were still alive. Afterwards, we walked around the Ximen shopping district. We got boba tea and soup dumplings from the famous Xing Fu Tang and were able to watch them make it right in front of us.
