Dec182008
Oh man, I would have never believed it. People who know me that I’d never do that voluntarily – but I’ve been at the Apple headquarters to get a very special present for a very special person. I also visited my good friend Doug who now works at Apple :). Here are some proof-pictures that I’ve really been there. It’s not worse than me@Microsoft I guess ;).
1 Infinite Loop is their actual address 🙂
the headquarters
Nov252008
I did the Cluster Challenge again this year. Last year was fun, but this year was better – we won! Here’s the story:
We started Saturday morning in Bloomington. The travel went pretty
smooth and Guido picked us up at the airport in Austin. We went directly
to the Conference location. The time before that was very stressful
because the machine wasn’t working quite as nice as we would like to.
The biggest problem was that the we could not change the CPU frequency
of the new iDataplex system. However, we were able to change it on the
older version and saw significant gains. We benchmarked that we could
run 16 nodes during the challenge and use 12 of them for HPCC (while 4
were idle) with our power constraints (2×13 A). So we convinced IBM to
give us a pre-release BIOS update which was supposed to enable CPU
frequency scaling. And it looked good! We were able to reduce the CPU
clock to 2.0 GHz (as on the older systems). However, it was 4am and we
had to ship at 6, so we didn’t have the time to test more. But back to
Austin …
The guys from Dresden were already waiting for us because the organizers
did not allow them to unpack the cluster alone (it was supposed to be a
team effort). We unpacked our huge box and rolled our 900 pound cluster into
our booth.
Our Cluster
We spent the remaining day with installing the system and pimping (;-))
our booth. It went pretty well. Then we began to deploy our hardware and
boot it from USB to do some performance benchmarks.
Installing the fragile Fiber Myrinet equipment (we didn’t break anything!)
We started with HPCC and were shocked twice. Number one was that the CPU
scaling that costed us so many sleepless night did not seem to help. All
tools and /proc/cpuinfo showed 2.0 GHz – but the power consumption was
still as high as with 2.5 GHz. So we wrote a small RDTSC benchmark to
check the CPU frequency – it still ran at 2.5 GHz. The BIOS was lying to
us :-(. The second shock was that HPL was twice as slow as it should
be. So much to the sleep …
Quite some time after midnight … still hacking on stuff. I’m trying to motivate (I am a good slave driver) our guys to go on.
The students tried to fix it … all night long. The conclusion was that
we had to drop our cool booting from USB idea due to the performance
loss. Later, it turned out that shared memory communication uses /tmp
(which was mounted via NFS) and was thus really slow (WTF!). Anyway, we
decided about one hour before the challenge started to fall back to
disks. This worked.
How high can one stack harddrives? Not too high actually ;). Man, this was hard to plug them back into the system.
The second problem was a tough one. The BIOS … lying to us. We were
finally able to get hold of an engineer from IBM. He tried hard but
couldn’t help us either. So the students had to make the hard decision
to run with two nodes less :-(.
In the meantime, me and Bob had fun while biking in order to power
laptops ;).
Bob Beck (UA) generating power on our fancy machine ;).
I was driving my laptop with the sandwiches I ate before :).
The Challenge finally starts
The challenge was about to start, the advisors couldn’t do anything
anymore, so we decided to get some fuel from the opening banquet for our
students in the nightshift ;).
Guido and me thinking about getting some good stuff for the students!
We finally found some good stuff on the showfloor *yay*.Advisor’s success!
Some of us were not totally up to speed all the time 😉 – It looks like somebody missed the start:
So the Challenge ran, and we had nothing to do (especially the advisers
who were just hanging around to feed and motivate the students). So we
did all kinds of weird things over night – and we had a bike ;).
I also started some coding during the challenge because I didn’t really
do anything but it was way to noisy to work on papers. I had to pose
inside the microsoft booth, while my laptop finished up some cool
things! Thanks to Erez for taking the picture at exactly the right time.
Some Linux-based “research” performed/finished inside the Microsoft booth.
Guido explains Vampir to the other teams on one of our three ultra-cool
41” displays (again, around midinght ;)). We had really nice speakers
at the challenge. Especially on Sunday, when all the others left, we
cranked them up and listened to the soundtrack of Black Hawk down. The
security guys seemed kind of confused to hear really loud base at 4am in
the morning ;).
Guido! Don’t help the “enemies” ;).
Youtube made it also on our display :). And nearly costed us a point by
disturbing the sound output of our power warning system. But Jens
realized it fortunately.
Watch yourself:Â Achmed the Dead Terrorist
Oh, and there was this Novell penguin that spontaneously caught fire. I
guess this happens when experienced computer scientists spend two days
to install a completely retarded operating system (with InfiniBand – ask
me about details if you’re interested). I love Linux, but it’s a shame
that the abbreviation SLES has the word “Linux” in it. Debian or Ubuntu
is so much better! But apparently, SLES is better prepared for the
applications (clearly not for administration or software maintenance
though).
Each booth was “armed” with at least one student during all the time.
Here are some images from after midnight.
The MIT booth – doesn’t it look more like Stonybrook?
The folks from Arizona State – they had a neat Cray – with Windows though. But it seems that it worked for them.
The guys from Colorado with Aspen systems (don’t ask them about their vendor partner).
The National Tsing Hua University – excellent people but their system was more of a jet engine than a cluster.
Our booth … note the image on the big screen ;).
The Alberta folks – last year’s champions. Darn good hackers!
Purdue with their SciCortex – they seemed rather annoyed all the time.
Our social corner: At 2am, most students didn’t have to do a lot (just
watching jobs). So they all gathered in front of our booth and played
cards :).
Two fluffy spectators were watching our oscilloscope animation during
the show-off on Thursday.
The team of judges, led by Jack Dongarra, talked to our students to
assess their abilities
After that, we won! We don’t have a picture of our fabulous win yet, but I’ll post it with some more links after I got it.
Oct52008
Saw this in the Tokyo subway, I’m wondering what the writing actually means :).
Oct22008
I had an interesting rental car to the airport. It was an automatic without gears, kind of weird thing:
Ok, now I’m in Tsukuba, Japan. The flight was less stressful as usual because I had an aisle seat and was walking around all the time. And I slept a lot because I didn’t really recover from the flight from Europe (it’s really stupid to go from Europe to Japan through the US :)). Anyway, it’s nice here and the hotel is awesome even though nobody speaks English.
The breakfast is also really cool (all Japanese stuff).They had very funny toilets in the conference center (I was missing internet access):
And other places preferred the poor-man’s toilet:
Here are some pictures of Tokyo:
View from the Tocho-something (Town Hall)
A nice park (no, I don’t know those guys!!! :))
A Temple
I’m wondering what this is. Looks like lots of booze!
Medieval shopping place (that’s what it said – but might have been a mistranslation)
Police – even in English – lame!
Another temple 🙂
Sep262008
Yeah, Dublin was very very uneventful. The social event in Johnny Fox’s pub was pretty cool :). Anyway, I enjoyed my stay in Europe a lot! Now I’m back in the US and … of course … United Airlines lost my luggage. Darn! I have to leave to Japan tomorrow! And I had the clothes for Japan in a readily packed bag in the other bag which is lost!
Idiots! I fully blame United for this one because Lufthansa could not check my luggage through from Dresden (United had a computer problem). So they told me to ask United in Frankfurt to relabel my bag. I did so – they refused, I asked again (people who know me know that I don’t give up easily). I used the mob-technique (get a huge mob in the queue behind you and do not move until you got what you want). I succeeded – they told me that they’d relabel my bag. But all they did was taking it off the airplane and loosing it :-(. I realized this in Washington … oh my. I’d like to say that I’ll never fly United again, but they usually have the best connection to Dresden :-(.
Aug252008
… are really cool! They have a “carpool lane”. Only cars with two or more people can drive on this lane, so, in the US, it’s usually empty :). But it’s a great idea! We should do that too.
They also have two-story freeways :). Probably a big waste of money:
Or even more:
Aug222008
Wow, LBL and Bereley is really cool. It’s basically at a large mountain. You can see San Francisco really well and the nature is great. I guess it’s really expensive :). My talk went very good and the listeners were very interested (we had many discussions).
Here the view from the Lab to San Francisco:
I’m now at Livermore. The hotel had a free wine hour today ;). But I missed it (had a fully-planned day). Ah, anyway, I’m here to work. The visit at the lab was very productive! I hope to work with some of those people soon ;).
I’ll proceed to the HOTI conference tomorrow ;).
Aug212008
Ah, I made it to San Jose, the fligth was rather ok (Northwest), and the
hotel that Cisco booked for me is really great (Hyatt, ridiculously
expensive). The breakfast is awesome (you have people who cook you
omeletts on demand ;)). I also have a very nice rental, a Ford Fusion
with MP3 player and a nice car stereo ;). I didn’t like Ford too much,
but I think I have to change my opinion (after the Mustang and now the
nice Fusion). And it has two exhaust pipes ;).
My nerdlunch talk at Cisco went ok and apparently broadcasted worldwide (they had
very very professional camera equipment). CR means Cisco Research ;). I’ll leave to LBL tomorrow.
Aug202008
Oh man, the big and crazy trip starts … I’ll leave tomorrow for San Jose, California to give a Nerd Lunch talk at the headquarter of Cisco Systems, a talk at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, another talk at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and to attend The Hot Interconnects Conference. After that I’ll leave to Dresden, stay for (nearly) one day at home and then leave to Dublin.
I got a neat looking rental. But it’s driving pretty badly actually – ah, let me cite my boss: “it’s shiny”. No, it’s a Dodge, not an Apple.
We’ll see how it goes tomorrow …
Jul302008
What can I tell … IU and National just rule!
 
