I hope I can get some pics of the installation phase posted here soon.

I am off to watch a movie or something….

I got in Krakow on the 22nd at about 9:30 AM. The hotel wouldn’t let me check in until 2:00 PM so I had to walk about the city. I found a shopping mall and worked on my presentation. By the time I checked in, had a shower and prayed Duhr and Aser, I was dead tired so I went to bed. I woke up at 11:00 PM. By the time I had finished my presentation, it was 6:00AM on the 23rd. So I got ready, had breakfast and set of for the conference.

The conference

I arrived at 7:30 and picked up my registration material. They gave me a backpack that was 10 times better than the crappy backpack I got at SC07.

Keynote speakers were a mix of brilliant and boring. I was really happy with the talk by Maria E. Orlowska about “Intrinsic Limits in Context Modeling”. She spoke about problems that people are promising to solve yet have been proved to be unsolvable. She states that context modeling is the way forward but we need to understand what the limits are. I like part of her talk that highlighted that when speed and size of our computing abilities have increased, computing itself has remained static in terms of what we can compute.

I was very Nervous about giving my presentation but It went very well. Now that I have got that over with, I can enjoy the conference. Other presentations of interest were by Intel about there 45nm shrink process and some linear algebra work on the cell processor.

I am really happy to be here. This is my first conference and so far I am impressed. Yesterday I attended the High Performance Computing on GPUs with CUDA tutorial. It seams that this tutorial had the largest registration in the history of SC. It was really good (even though I already new alot of the stuff). They had a very good talk on performance optimization which I am of course interested in as I am working on the NVIDIA 8800 GPU.

I hope that I can create some good contacts and meet some new people.

UPDATE:

I got an email a few days ago that pointed out to me the fact that my SC07 poster is not available for download anywhere! I am remedying this by uploading it here

So you could say I get first picks either way I am now the proud owner of 2 sunray1 devices. During the last 2 months I also picked up a 17″ CRT and a few old machines that were pillaged to produce a dual PIII800Mhz system with 768MB of ram and 2 13GB HDDs!

Today I installed SRSS3.1 for Linux and I am presently writing this post on the sunray! words can’t describe how cool this is . And when I finally move out of Fenner It will even better!! This is a silent device… no moving parts whatsoever. Since I have no room at Uni accommodation I have the sunray sitting next to the server (which is very noisy) but as soon as I move out I will be able to stick the server where it will not be heard.

Anyway here is how I went about setting up the server.

      apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

      apt-get install sun-java5-jre sun-java5-plugin

      ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.08/jre /etc/opt/SUNWut/jre

The Installation was pretty easy. I do however seem to have a problem with audio. When I login in I get the login sounds. That is the last sound I do hear. I am unable to play any audio… so I am working on that.

The other thing that might be of interest is that I had always thought that the sunrays were net-bootable PCs. It turns out that they are not! they are rather a continuation of the server. so when you login on the sun you are working on the server.

I will of course post something if/when I get the audio working properly.

It was a very interesting talk and talk was well presented. I first found it a bit odd that he would just show up at the ANU like that, but it seems that Andrew was at the ANU from 1989 to 1999 and remains a Visiting Fellow of the University.

To tell you the truth I am not sure that enough of the first session students even understood me. We had to go quite slowly as the students had a very bad understanding of the basic network functions. I had people fumbling with, socket() bind() and accept() I wouldn’t have minded if that was what we were supposed to cover, but it seems that they took this stuff about a month ago.

Also I had this bad feeling that 2 kids were laughing about me, but a just told myself that I was just been silly and even if they were it doesn’t matter . I gradualy worked them towards select() which was the end goal (a multi-client echo server to be exact -they call it an IRC server- ).

I felt that I did better in the 2nd session because I was more focused and I got some feedback about the state of the students from my first session. I also attended Bobs (the senior tutor and a lecturer) 1st session today so that helped me a lot.

So even thought I was really scared that I would be exposed for the impostor I try and convince myself I am not, I was able to go through with not too many casualties.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out

I mean the bike seat is HARD. I am not sure but I think I am going to need a padded seat or something. And as I am posting this from collage, I admit that I dread the ride home

2. I cooked for myself today and for the first time since I arrived in Australia I had a meal after 2:00pm
In fact, as I made about twice what I was able to eat, I will have something to eat tomorrow.

Next to SuperBarn was a fruit and vegetable shop so I went to see how much fruit costs in this country boy was I in for a shock
I bought 4 bananas , 4 peaches and 4 nectarines for 11.30!!! I can’t help but comparing that to how much it would have cost me back home (about $2).

For the first time in my life I find myself having to be careful with my money this way. I have given my self a ration of 2 pieces of fruit per day. It is a very weird sensation. I feel…. poor

Anyway, I am looking at a bike on Monday that looks very good in the picture so I hope to buy it and become mobile. I am also meeting my supervisor (Dr. Alistair) for the first time on Monday as well. I hope it all goes well.