At a Loose End
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I just got back from the Big Scary Thing that was taking up most of my semester, leading a team for the previously mentioned Cluster Challenge competition.
Quick summary is: teams of undergraduates from different universities team up with vendor partners (who give them hardware) and build cluster computers, then optimize open source scientific applications to run on them most effectively. During the competition, the teams get about 45 hours to complete as many application data sets as they can on their machines, then answer questions about their preparation and knowledge of high performance computing.
I very much liked the "feel" of Austin (music and...hippies? in Texas?) although we didn't spend too much time outside. The competition itself was interesting. The way things turned out we were the only new team there (all the others had done it last year, although some of the team members were new). A lot of the work we put in throughout the semester turned out not to help us proportionally in the end, and some things we could have spend a little more time on and it would have gotten us far...like really understanding what the scientific applications did. Overall I think we did rather well considering we were working with a brand-new platform that the applications weren't designed for (the new Windows HPC Server). I feel like the whole process was a good application of the "wisdom of no escape" for me, I learned a whole bunch about hardware, compilers, and working with Windows that I would have had a hard time discovering with independent study. It's funny to think that almost exactly two years ago I had no idea what an operating system was, and after all this I honestly think I'm now capable of putting together my own cluster.
I'm really happy about the team who won (Indiana/Dresden) because they came darn prepared and were the friendliest, most helpful team we talked to.
I feel a bit funny now. I've been catching up on sleep since I got back and trying to figure out what to do next. I have a semester to finish and need to try to catch up on my other classes, but I still feel a bit at a loss now that this is over. It was supposed to be the last thing I did in the field of high performance computing, because I decided last semester that I wasn't as passionate about the area as I would like to be. I need to find a summer internship now, hopefully in something (as my boss would say) I'm relatively passionate about. I'd been waiting to be "free" to choose my next direction for a while, but now that I am I feel a bit lost. I think it's time to go find some inspiration and motivation so I can come up with some action items and maybe take on something new.
Quick summary is: teams of undergraduates from different universities team up with vendor partners (who give them hardware) and build cluster computers, then optimize open source scientific applications to run on them most effectively. During the competition, the teams get about 45 hours to complete as many application data sets as they can on their machines, then answer questions about their preparation and knowledge of high performance computing.
I very much liked the "feel" of Austin (music and...hippies? in Texas?) although we didn't spend too much time outside. The competition itself was interesting. The way things turned out we were the only new team there (all the others had done it last year, although some of the team members were new). A lot of the work we put in throughout the semester turned out not to help us proportionally in the end, and some things we could have spend a little more time on and it would have gotten us far...like really understanding what the scientific applications did. Overall I think we did rather well considering we were working with a brand-new platform that the applications weren't designed for (the new Windows HPC Server). I feel like the whole process was a good application of the "wisdom of no escape" for me, I learned a whole bunch about hardware, compilers, and working with Windows that I would have had a hard time discovering with independent study. It's funny to think that almost exactly two years ago I had no idea what an operating system was, and after all this I honestly think I'm now capable of putting together my own cluster.
I'm really happy about the team who won (Indiana/Dresden) because they came darn prepared and were the friendliest, most helpful team we talked to.
I feel a bit funny now. I've been catching up on sleep since I got back and trying to figure out what to do next. I have a semester to finish and need to try to catch up on my other classes, but I still feel a bit at a loss now that this is over. It was supposed to be the last thing I did in the field of high performance computing, because I decided last semester that I wasn't as passionate about the area as I would like to be. I need to find a summer internship now, hopefully in something (as my boss would say) I'm relatively passionate about. I'd been waiting to be "free" to choose my next direction for a while, but now that I am I feel a bit lost. I think it's time to go find some inspiration and motivation so I can come up with some action items and maybe take on something new.
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