So consider using it! It’s great! Even insideHPC says so: MPI 2.2’s Scalable Process Topologies. 🙂
Aug82011
Aug42011
One more on Hot Interconnects
Jul292011
Hot Interconnects 2011 teaser and highlights!
Rich Brueckner from insideHPC interviews the Co-Chairs of HotI’11 (Fabrizio Petrini, Patrick Geoffray, and I) in a podcast. Citing one of the chairs “Listen to it, it’s fun! Three horrible accents but a great program!” :-).
Jul212011
Heatwave … wow!
Ok, so I guess I just felt what 40 degrees celsius and 80% humidity feel like :-). It’s amazing here. There is a heat-wave in the US and Illinois is one of the hottest states. But I’m still man enough to survive without AC at home (ceiling fans work wonder, even at 35 degrees celsius inside!).
Jul82011
Visiting Germany (yes, visiting)
My other planned summer vacation fell through (of course after I booked my ticket to Europe :-)). Yes, I was planning a vacation (believe it or not). Vacation means that I may only read email once a day :-). Anyway, so I invited a friend and we decided to do the tourist thing in Germany, actually, more around the area where my parents live (Saxony). Obviously, I lived in this area for quite a while but it was very nice to actually explore it! So the tour was: Bautzen, Goerlitz, Munich (I had to apply for a new US visa there … and my iPad was stolen …), Koenigsstein, and Dresden! It was all very beautiful! Not much to say besides the commented pictures below :-).
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- Bautzen — imagine of somebody asks you to translate *that* 🙂
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- The famous Reichenturm
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- The city hall
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- The watertower
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- Bautzen is surrounded by a beautiful old city wall!
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- Watertower again, medieval ambient 🙂
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- Goerlitz
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- … there are a lot of those towers.
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- and churches 🙂
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- We also walked to Poland (standing in it here) — this is how Germany looks from Poland, isn’t it shiny?
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- Nice medieval streets everywhere 🙂
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- Munich — the English Garden is right next to the US consulate!
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- The Chinese Tower
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- Rathaus
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- Das Isartoor 🙂
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- Dresden! We walked in 🙂
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- Zwinger
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- Koenigsstein, we decided to walk up (like in the good old days!). It’s a beautiful walk and much shorter than the tourist office claims (25 instead of 40 minutes).
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- Would you attack that thing? Nobody ever tried :-).
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- This is the first entrance (defense circle)
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- … the second …
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- … the third …
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- … and the fourth, finally in there!
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- Nice view, definitely.
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- Cute towers 🙂
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- And strange ones too!
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- Der “Lustraum” – if you know what I mean ;-).
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- Some leftover cannons 🙂
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- I couldn’t take it home though.
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- The city of Koenigsstein is somewhat small. Do you see our car here?
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- A true fortress!
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- The 2nd deepest well in Europe!
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- Da
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- The famous “Elbradweg”, must be very nice …
Jul82011
My self-grown citrus thingy blooms!
Huh, I came back home from a longer trip and, instead of dying, my citrus plant (not even sure what it is, either orange or grapefruit) was blooming! One step further towards the master gardener :-).
Jul22011
MPI-2.2 topologies @Cisco’s HPCN blog!
Jeff Squyres, “the MPI guy” at Cisco, invited me to a guest post about MPI 2.2 (a long while ago :-)). I finally got to do it and here is the result: http://blogs.cisco.com/performance/mpi-2-2%E2%80%99s-scalable-process-topologies-and-topology-mapping-in-practice/.
Thanks Jeff!
Jun292011
Sturm auf La Bastille!
I have been at the INRIA-Illinois Joint Lab workshop in Grenoble this week. It was a great workshop and I had amazing interactions with some French. I think we will form some interesting collaborations!
On the fun side, I ran up La Bastille in Grenoble! It was really nice, perfect weather (very light rain and warm)! It took us 45 minutes to run up (including getting there from the hotel) and 30 back. It was really great.
Here is a picture of La Bastille:
Lame people could take the bubble lift … but not real men 🙂
So you know what to do when you’re in Grenoble the next time! Btw., we ran up the stairs (which was nice) and down another path/street :-).
Jun252011
Taste of Chicago!
I was at the Taste of Chicago festival (yeah, I skipped the Taste of Champaign and went to the real one ;-)). Thanks Dries! It was pretty nice and I had some good food! There were also some strange people attracted by the crowd (as usual). The banner of the weirdo-family says:
“Men should: Lead their families, provide for their families, bring up children for the lord, not be sports idolators, hate rock, rap and country music, have short hair, be masculine. Read Bible for details”
:-D. This is hilarious! And I’m sure that the guy with the megafon is doing all this. Well, he has short (or no?) hair as far as I can tell!! 🙂
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- Overweight cops 🙂
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- A pretty huge crowd here
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- Yep, Chicago!
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- Haha, cooking 🙂
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- The funny guys (see description above) 🙂
Jun122011
Supercomputing 2011 and 2011 Committee Meeting
Right after the conference in Tucson, I had to go the the SC11/SC12 committee meeting in Seattle. It didn’t seem useful to fly back to Champaign over the weekend (I could have spent 20 hours in planes and 6 hours at home, probably sleeping anyway. So I just stayed in Seattle over the weekend. I received very bad news during that trip but fortunately, I was around a friend and we went hiking in Seattle (thanks Frank!).
We did two day-hikes that were not trivial. Unfortunately, I had my knee injured before but it was ok. On the first day, we climbed mount SI, acutally, we climbed from the bottom to the *very* top (the rock thing on the top!!). This was quite a hike. Approximately 4000 feet height difference and three hours walking (one way). The last climb was up a massive rock wall, it was very dangerous (adrenaline!) but also very impressive and nice. We beat the mountain!
The second day hike was to a large waterfall and a lake at the top of a mountain at Lake Serene. It was just stunningly beautiful even though I got a bit wet in the waterfall, and slipping was somewhat dangerous too :-).
Here is the GPS tracking of our Lake Serene hike (my new phone rocks!):
Here are some pictures:
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- The majestic mountain! Yes, we hiked from the very bottom to the very top (the massive rocks at the top).
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- Very nice views on the way up!
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- The first “station” where most people stopped :-). Frank and me made it too!
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- Most people stopped here (We’re still in America :-)).
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- Mount Rainier, very impressive!
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- Me and Rainier again
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- Enough posing, this is the last wall to climb!! Kinda straight up a rock wall 🙂
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- Yes, falling was a big danger but it only happened nearly 🙂
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- No stairs but nice rocks
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- The very bottom, people thought we were crazy that we tried to jump even higher than that 🙂
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- And higher!
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- The proof that Frank and me made it!
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- Very nice view on our friend Rainier again!
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- We took another route down (without knowing).
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- The bottom of the mountain had a very nice valley with a river.
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- Very nice.
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- But the water was *freezing* cold!
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- Day hike two – first station – a large waterfall.
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- Yes, falling can be deadly!
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- And the water was really rough!
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- That’s why I had to walk into the fall!!! Man, the drift and pressure was really high, I was nearly swept away. At least I was very wet afterwards but it was worth this picture :-).
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- The waterfall from the bottom
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- Ah, that’s where I would have fallen :-). I still prefer standing there.
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- Somebody had to keep this thing in place :-).
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- The lake at the very top. The hike was dangerous and long and the lake somewhat disappointing. And it was *really* cold too!
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- Yes, it was still full of ice (June).
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- But Frank and I made it!
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- And saw the very nice views again!
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- And some nice things on the way down :-).