So Summer has officially kicked in and I am already busy getting my small chores done. I finally decided to upgrade my Dell workstation and ordered a 2GB memory transplant from Newegg. I am surprised that the price of memory has gone so low. Anyways after procrastinating a lot, I decided to reinstall Windows XP on my machine. I think Microsoft does not like reinstallation of their OS, because the installation procedure is very tedious as compared to my fav OSX (hint: I love bashing Windoze).
Also after installing see this window to understand the number of updates available for Windows XP SP2.
After one of those moments of reckoning, when I got up at 7 am to check the status of my paper, I was happy and relieved to find my paper accepted. I know that this does not count among the most widely accepted moments of reckoning, but yeah this was mine. So finally I packed my bags to attend the conference at NCSA .
However, the joys of a solitary trip cannot be reaped due to the unwritten rule by Missus, "Missus accompanies hubby on all official trips". So the first part of the trip was a roller coaster ride with delayed flights to O'Hare, extended family stay at SIL's atya's place, getting to meet roly poly, chubby, cutie pie niece after 5 months, trip to the Field Museum, Sears towers. So this small motley of 14 people had all age groups right from 85 years to 5 months and kudos to Mandar and Mahesh Kaka for managing most of the group.
I arrived at Champaign, IL courtesy Amtrak. The conference was excellent, and presented me an opportunity to interact with the actual cluster users, the scientists behind all the weather modeling, astrophysical simulations, molecule visualizations. It's always interesting when you are on the other side just accelerating code on clusters with no idea of how you are contributing to science and then these conferences let you meet those scientists who benefit from application acceleration. So anyways, I presented my paper and benefited from a tour of the NCSA computers plus the awesome machine room that houses the world's 8th fastest supercomputer. Also most of the talks were beneficial and centered over the development of the petascale and exoscale computers. Only disappointing aspect was that inspite of being a Linux conference, the conference proceedings was given on a( Windows executable file system) flash drive.
I stayed with Pari & fly before flying out to BB and be struck by pollen allergies...waaah:(
