Yes, even the extreme temperatures or the really strange weather can not distract me from running :). It was pretty much impossible to run on the streets or the sidewalks as they were really slippery. But running the good old clear creek trail was great!

The weather got better (snow melted and turned Bton into a lake for two days *** I’m wondering why they build the sidewalk to collect all the water on it?) and I’m going to go running today :). The gym (SRSC) is also really pretty and I’ll get some workout after the running with my buddy Anju.

I’m leaving tomorrow for the states again. The CHiC cluster project at TU Chemnitz that I have been involved in has been finished so far. We spent 2.64 Mio EUR (+ 1.5 Mio for the room construction) and got a 538 Node Dual Opteron (Dual Core, 2152 cores) system with a full bisectional bandwidth InfiniBand network. It reaches 8 TFLOPS Linpack and 11 Peak (this would make No. 82 in the top500, but we missed the deadline) and has 60 TByte disk space with 3.5 GB/s. It is also interesting to mention that the whole system is water cooled with a micro-climate inside every single rack. Many people have been involved in the design and construction of this system. Prof. Rehm was chair of the committee, Jens was mainly involved in the call for bids and Jochen … hmm, nobody knows what he did. I’ve been a member of the technical design team that consisted of Frank, Torsten (another one) and me. Frank and Torsten held the main resposibility for the whole system and the construction work. I was mainly involved in the design (meetings, discussions) and I was responsible for the IB network.

We made some group photos of us to keep the rememberance (note our corporate identity chic T-shirts – all credits for this go to Frank (holds the copyright of the image ;)) and Torsten!).

Torsten, me and Frank in front of the racks.

Me trying to destroy the core switch ;). Note the 288 InfiniBand cables that Frank had to fight with regularly.

It’s not too tidy ;). More than 5000 cables have been deployed in this system.

The compute nodes.

Me – still trying to destroy the core switch 😉

our group

posing with a rack (yes, that’s my hair getting sucked in)!

Yes, I went back to do some relaxation cooking :). I cooked “Blueberry orange chicken” with a friend, and I think we had lots of fun.

1. Grated orange peel and pressed oranges:

2. Cooking it with honey and Blueberries:

The end result:

So, the CHiC Symposium and the KiCC workshop are over. I’ve been involved in the core organization of both and they stressed me a lot. But I would say they’ve both been a success (especially the KiCC workshop seems to gain more and more attention from all over Germany).

The funniest part was a simulation video in the opening talk. OK, assume you sit in the middle of a talk about supercomputing and you see this simulation without any explanation (klick image):

What do YOU think? Yes, exactly this – the whole auditorium was *amused*. And now image the speaker saying: “this is a simulation of the red tower”. Ok, that’s how you could call it probably *grin*. I had hard problems not to laugh. The “Red Tower” is a building in Chemnitz, but I assume that the guests from all over Germany did not know this :-).

The KiCC workshop went really fine (thanks again to our main sponsor Knuerr and the last minute sponsor Megware). The next workshop will be in Aachen at the 2007/12/12.

I think I will miss the Comedy aehem Computer Architecture Group in Chemnitz!

Yes – back in Germany. It was funny to cross the border after one month. The first thing I did was to accelerate to 200 km/h (125 mph) on the autobahn ;). I like the German autobahn, it makes me feel home and driving produces enough adrenaline to save the rollercoaster. Anyway, some random facts:

• time to go from Liege to Berlin (688 km/430 miles): 5:30 hrs
• average fuel consumption: 7.9 l/100km
• average speed on the autobahn: 160-190 km/h (100-120 mph)
• top speed: 233 km/h (146 mph, downhill – yes, my speedo stops at 220, but I have a GPS 😮 )
• travel time from Berlin to Chemnitz (262 km/164 miles): 1:55 hrs
• total distance this month: approximately 2500 km / 1560 miles
• # of loonies who wanted to go faster than me: some 😉
• # of policecars I chased with 220 km/h (137 mph): 1
• # of emergency breaks where I lost 2mm rubber from my tires: 1 (behind the chased policecar in a cloud of burned rubber from them)
• # of trucks passing each other incredibly slowly: infinite
• # of 120 speed limits I ignored because it seemed so slow: 2
• # of car breakdowns: 0 (yeah, my Celica rules)

So my Europe roundtrip is finished and everything went fine. My visit at the US embassy seemed also successfull, so I’ll hit the states soon. Ah, and I have to say that Berlin seems to be a very nice city! The centre is nice and most girls are just georgeous – and speak German :).

Update: some pictures from Berlin are here!