Zein’s place on the net

Getting to Krakow

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 writing this post from SC07 in Reno NV, USA. I am presenting a poster titled The Sony PlayStation 3 and the NVIDIA 8800 GPU: Performance and Programmability Evaluation for Machine Learning. Big title, huh?

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

The first time I saw a sunray was when I was doing my undergrad (2001). It was love at first sight. And even though the AAST wasn’t using them (there were about 4 thrown in a box), there was no chance of me getting my hands on one

Fast forward to 2007! I am at the ANU and I end up with 2 sunray1 devices. One of the best things about the Department of Computer Science is that when they are about to throw things out, they leave it in front of the Technical Support Group’s Offices for about a week! usually a student will pick things up!

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.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Andrew Tridgell at the ANU. He talked about some of the techniques used to analyze undocumented network protocols.

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.

I have been asked to fill in for one of the tutors for a computer networking course. It seems that he was not able to finish the semester (only half of the semester left now). I have two, 2 hour sessions on Wednesday and today was my first try. I had only about 10 students in the first lab and about 5 in the second and I think I did better in the 2nd session then the first.

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

On Friday I bought a new bike. Today I cycled to Uni. I now hurt in various areas.

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

Today I did two interesting things:
1. I helped physically install a Sun Fire X4600 Server with 8 dual core Opterons and 32GB of RAM.
I can’t describe the beauty of Sun hardware

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.

Today I went to the closest mall (Canberra City Center) and visited Target. I expected Target to be Australia’s Wallmart. To my surprise it was in general more expensive that SuperBarn (I had never heard of it before).

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.

It has been so long since I last blogged. So many things have changed since then. The biggest change is that I changed continents I actually moved from Africa (Egypt) to Australia. I am at the Australian National University getting my Masters degree.

The trip itself was a big event. It took me about 2 days to get here from Egypt. I am currently undergoing the cultural shock phase. The difference between ANU and the AAST is astounding.

I am however having some issues with finding Halal food and stuff. I also miss my family and friends terribly. Things here are very expensive. I payed $7.10 for a falafel sandwich This is very funny as a falafel sandwich (about 1/3 of the size) cost about LE 0.50 back home (that is about $0.125).

I also was very lucky in that I received an email from Fenner Hall (Student Dorm) offering a room while checking my email in Dubai. Canberra seams to be going through a rental crisis.

I hope to get adjusted to life in Australia and start making progress in my masters degree. I would like to finish in a year if that is possible.

It is 4:36 AM now. My biological clock wouldn’t let me sleep at normal hours but I am starting to feel tired. I am off to bed then. I have to wake up for fajir in an hour.