I came back from the Open MPI collective meeting in Albuquerque. It was amazingly fruitful and we had many new ideas for non-blocking collectives. Many of the are actually new problems but it’s good to discuss them before I am challenged with those questions at conferences without preparation. The meeting was hosted by the university of New Mexico

To be precise, the Center for High Performance Computing at the UNM:

We ran through the discussions pretty quickly (actually too quickly for my taste, because we “dropped” (i.e., decided not to implement) most of the nice collv2 things we designed last year) so that we finished early. We had the last late afternoon (5pm) off and I decided to go with a guy from Sun Microsystems to do some sightseeing. We went to the Petroglyph National Monument to see some drawings of native americans.

We had to wak through the hot desert to see them

and they were really disappointing!!!! :-(.

Anyhow, we went on and wanted to see the “Vulcanoes”.

The first one was pretty lame …

but we had a nice view over Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains

And of course the *real* volcano!

That we finally climbed! *yeah*

So that’s pretty much it! The afternoon was over and we flew back the next day. A very productive meeting!

We’ve been to another State Park this Sunday. It was great, we hiked the whole day and got totally lost in the wilderness (there were deer paths that looked like human paths :)). The waterfall is really ridiculous (see picture), but the wolf cave is really cool.

It’s a small (very small) tunnel-like cave where one can go (crawl) through. It’s not really advertised on the webpage (I guess they are afraid that some people just get stuck in the middle – this nearly happened to me as I realized that my shoulders are to wide for several passages in there :)).

Yeah, we biked to Lake Monroe on Saturday :). The bike ride was great even if we lost our way due to my misinterpretation of “Moores Pike”. I know I know … American cities are organized in grids and one can not get lost. But somebody decided to rename streets in the middle of town!!!!! Anyway, we finally made it :). The beach was nice but the swimming area was ridiculously small. And the worst thing is that the Indiana Department o Natural Resources (DNR) seems to be *really* stupid. So their goal is to protect nature (sort of I guess). Ok, here’s the deal: if you come by car or van or truck or minibus or whatever vehicle, you pay $4 gate fee per vehicle. Fine, but if you come by bike, it’s $2 per bike!!!!! So, calculate how many people fit into a minivan (I’ve seen a van loaded with at least 10!). And we paid $4 for two bikes! That’s such a rip off. And I must say it really encourages me to take my car next time and get 3 people to join me – it’s half the price. Seriously, they must be completely retarded. And we’ve been pretty much the only two cyclists who came from “the outside” (there were more, but they seemed to come from the campground which was 100 meters away). Oh my gosh! I have to file a complaint! I don’t know where yet, but I’ll do!

To the links:

The boys project .. pretty interesting. Boys are “extremer” than girls in many regards ;).

A funny airline complaint – awesome ;-). Don’t choose this seat!

Did you know that yoga and sex are related? Let’s test it ;-)!