It’s just nice when you login to your machine and see something like:


11:50:20 up 919 days, 19:21, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.10, 0.08
[Mon Aug 29 11:50:20] htor@benten:~


One can make some conclusions:

• 919 days no power outage (the server is hanging off a normal outlet)
• there were numerous network outages during this time
• the software raid also went on a rampage and halted the system for half a day (but came back afterwards)
• 919 days no kernel upgrade (I don’t know of any remote exploits for the running kernel, I won’t tell the version though ;-))
• the hardware (including the disks which make a strange sound since about a year) is rather robust (given that I got the machine from the department’s “dumpster”). The HDs will probably die once they stop spinning :-).

HotI was again a huge success this year! Intel’s facilities were very professional and video recording was just amazing (they had a full camera crew of 5 people including one producer on site). I enjoyed it a lot! And I’ll do one more year of TPC Co-Chair in 2012.

In the meantime, there was also another news article about the conference: EETimes. Unfortunately, I’m slightly mis-quoted but it’s not that bad (but who would built a 17-d Torus, not sure where this came from ;-)).

So consider using it! It’s great! Even insideHPC says so: MPI 2.2’s Scalable Process Topologies. 🙂

More press coverage: http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-08-03/silicon_valley_symposium_heats_up_discussion_of_high_performance_interconnects.html 🙂

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!).

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!