Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Last minute deals

So I am in NJ running around to get a good deal on stuff...I picked up a couple of CF cards for me and Harsh, a 500GB HDD for Harsh, etc. Managed to finally get a good deal on a SUV rental to DTW for New Year...!!! Haven't been able to adjust to work mode yet. I am trying hard or rather hardly.. excited abt the D-Day...!!!!
Picked up some puja samagri from Oaktree rd and then had some spicy chaat to boot...
well all the clocks are ticking now...12 more days to go

Monday, November 19, 2007

Snowing in NJ

Well it's snowed a bit today in Somerset, NJ. Pretty nice to watch the small blobs of cotton candy falling from the sky and since the temperature was not that low, they just melted after falling on the ground.
Got to eat authentic "ghar ka khaana" thanks to "MIL". Lunch comprised of white vatana curry, rotis. Dinner was something entirely new to me-"Chakolya" curry made with cooked rotis..or something like that. I liked it-something new and interesting. Sauntered down to the Desi store in S.Plainsfield and picked up quite some stuff for both NJ and BB.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

SC07-part II, III and so on


SC07 is in full swing...Hot keywords: Multi-core, Cell, FPGA in no particular order. On Monday (11/12), I attended the FPGA tutorial: pretty elementary stuff. But I had a chance to see what the industry and the HPC community was interested in general. I think the most entertaining piece was getting to know the current and future trends in computing. This gives a new perspective to my research and I am able to evaluate my research in comparison to where the industry is heading. Monday evening: The exhibit floors open finally..lots of companies are throwing away prizes, notably Intel throwing 45prizes in 45 minutes to celebrate their 45nm release. I tried a lot but the "unlucky" me did not win any of the prizes. I almost forgot to have dinner as I was so busy checking out the prize quotients of the booths. I rated the booths giving out Apple products a PQ of 5 and above. Anyways a fun-filled evening with two free extra large drinks on the house..!!!
Tuesday(11/13): I managed to meet with someone from AMD, Inc.(FPGA, MD), GiDEL, a senior researcher from IBM, etc. I attended a couple of sessions as part of my student volunteer duties. I had an opportunity to talk to Brian from FPGA.com on "Precision analysis requirements for FPGA applications". He was stressing on the need for a standard to adhere to while developing applications and implementing them on FPGAs. There's no need for sticking to double precision when you can get away with single precision. In the evening, it was time to attend vintage car show as part of the SGI 25th anniversary celebrations (check the pic). I admire SGI for pulling its socks after filing for bankruptcy two years back. It has become a formidable company after concentrating on its core competencies such as the shared memory model machines (and yes..FPGA based computing). The SGI event included free dinner and drinks as part of the party. great event in general...!!!
Wednesday(11/14): I attended a PVFS(Parallel Virtual File Systems) session and then a BE(Broader Engagement) panel about "How to keep a job in the Computing industry?". Both the sessions were eye-opening and interesting. That evening all of us headed out to a Thai place for dinner.
Thursday(11/15): Apparently the last day of the conference saw a lot of activity. I had to attend a session as a student volunteer plus attended a meeting with SGI ppl at 1 pm. In the end, Rajesh, Hari, Ganesh and myself roamed arnd taking pics with the NEC supercomputer node (>1.6TFlops), Cray nodes, etc. We started packing up our VT booth by 4pm. We finished that by 7pm and then headed out to an Indian place for dinner.
Friday(11/16): The place is deserted, the net's down and a spectacular week has come to an end at Reno.

Monday, November 12, 2007

SC07 Reno--Here I am

I am in Reno attending the SC07 conference. I took a flight from IAD to LAX and then a connecting flight from LAX to Reno. I attended my session on Sunday feeling all bogged down and jetlagged. The workshop on High Performance ReConfigurable Technology was very interesting and I learnt a lot about compilers, high performance applications using FPGAs. In the end, there was an interesting panel that met to discuss the future trends and this was the most interesting part of the workshop. In short, the future trend is towards identifying or hiring a "computer-architecture aware" software engineer to develop common applications on FPGAs. Using FPGAs for mainstream applications can also reduce the cost of FPGAs as compared to CPUs.
In the evening, all of us attended the Bowling party held at the National Bowling Stadium. I have still not adapted myself to the time zone change. I wish I had an FPGA embedded in my brain that could adapt to the time zones, etc. resulting in better productivity.
BTW my convention center is in a very scenic place surrounded by snow-capped mountains. very nice frame for a pic. I shall post one on my blog as soon as time permits.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Week ends on weekend


I know what the hell does that title mean..but if you were in my position you would have appreciated the weekends...So I worked the whole week on my proposal only to have it very ruthlessly dissected by my advisor. I almost lost the hope to continue my work on my PhD and decided that it was time for a break..Evening 6pm me, Manas and Ranjana are off to DC...Reached DC by 12.30pm after taking a wrong exit on I-66. eventful..
Saturday..we bought our first digital SLR--Canon EOS Rebel--what a beauty..and so easy to grip contours I must say..the silver body looks attractive....we went to an eventful trip along Skyline drive..to capture the Fall colours of 2007. I recommend everyone to drive along Skyline and see the Fall colors..It's too good a drive to miss..
Sunday was time for some unusual stuff like Raspberry picking. That was topped off with Dosas and Ada from Madras Palace. and ya it was time to get back to BB..with a very very heavy heart I started driving back to BB..I hope I can finish soon and move away from BB.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

New Mac software--WOW...!!!

I have noticed that trivial and very random discussions with my roomies lead to very definite destinations. Thanks to my roomie..the "Mac-man-as-ten-Garu" (I am not very sure if this is a very clever misnomer for him--MT for short), I ended up on the rite side of the world when I bought a Mac after a disastrous stint with my dual boot Windows and Fedora Compaq lappy.
I feel so complete using one machine for all my programming, writing reports, thesis, etc. and ya it's such a cool machine. So on one random dinner time, MT mentioned the usage of a better PDF viewer--Skim. Skim is such a lightweight PDF reader and is based on the fact that you can make your comments while reading papers, post stickies, etc. I think coming from the creators of Bibdesk, this is a very handy utility for all graduate students (Sorry for the bias towards graduate students). Neways I was also introduced to TextMate and what can I say about it?? This is truly the best app that can take care of all your text writing tasks such as programming in a host of languages, Latex (this is my fav), etc. Although it's not free you can always try it out for a month and then buy the product for about 30 bucks or so. And ya it's worth the investment. BTW I am not the DEVELOPER of these products and I am NOT in anyway connected to them. After using them both, I am like a kid playing with newly found toys(oops software on my Macbook)
So what are you Mac users waiting for?? Go ahead and try them out..!!!!

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Academic life huh....

Academic life takes its toll on every individual. Now yours truly has been pursuing academics for more than 25 years...Wow..that's too much ..!!! The common student starts his/her academic life at the age of three years old and that saga goes on till about 25 or so. I am counting in years of kindergarten, primary, secondary, higher secondary, college, Grad school if any... and ya you reach something near 25....!!! quarter life invested in academics already...Sometimes I wonder is it worth all that effort..most of the techie millionaires made cool products and truck loads of money without even completing their bachelor's degree.
Anyways all the frustration for this blog stemmed from an incident that happened today. Mom happened to ask me a very trivial question (absolutely not trivial for me) " Mone, when will you finish your PhD??" Apparently all my relatives have been asking what I have been upto in the US of A. My parents are concerned about the duration of my PhD, which has been only 4 years to be precise. I got off into a discussion explaining the nuances of a PhD, it's not examination oriented but research oriented...blah blah...research is such a painstaking procedure that follows Murphy's Law....all the wrong things happen on the important demo days..so on and so forth...more blah blah..Finally mom chose to change the topic and that saved me. But how can I convince my mom otherwise that my graduation date is determined by my prof and not me, if he's happy I graduate...
Anyways life's like that..incidents like this motivate you to get closer to your preferred graduation deadline...!!!!
PS: I need to have a drink to drown my woes of spending three years doing my PhD, now that mom reminded me about it...and ya what a nice reason to have a drink on Tuesday...!!!!

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

July 16th

Hmmm...I have deleted all my previous posts and I have decided to start afresh. Today's the 16th of July and that coincides with a lot of things. Today's my frnd's b'day, a frnd who's not there anymore, a frnd lost due to a quirk of fate, a Cancerian who lived life to the fullest.
I wish her many happy returns of the day wherever she is...
Today was a routine day in school with lot of reading up on Synchronous Data Flow graphs. I did manage to fix one small issue with the terminal title on my Mac:
Add this to your .bash_profile:
trap 'printf "\033]0; `history 1 | cut -b8-` ${USER}@${HOSTNAME%%.*}: ${PWD/#$HOME/~}\007"' DEBUG
This sets your terminal window to a ssh server incase you login to one and you can also the pwd.
The link is here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...70628002730528

Caught up with Deepti Chechi after some weeks..lot of information exchange a.k.a gossiping.LOL ahhh..me off to watch a hindi/malayalam movie...3 days for HP7...!!!!