Torsten Hoefler’s blog

Those who know me know that I’m usually careful about nutrition. I visited some friends in Indiana last week and my host (Nick) invited me to home-grown squashes, turnip greens and zucchinis. Man, I’m jealous … it inspired me to finally begin my herb garden project. And here it is, my first american herb garden:

Ok, it’s a single Basil plant. But hey, I have harvested three times in the last week (two salads and spaghetti). I also seeded parsley and am planning to extend it next week if I have time (a second pot).

The one thing I like most about food here right now is that all watermelons are awesome and cheap! Not like in Germany where 4 out of 5 melons taste like cardboard and cost a fortune. I even tasted a yello watermelon last week – looks very weird (like yellow text marker):

But tastes very very nice!

Hunts sells a new Ketchup brand since last month:

I’m sure that the HCFS mafia, aehem, the Corn Refiners Association does not like this very much. There are also two recent studies that seem interesting: High Fructose Corn Syrup Linked to Liver Scarring, Research Suggests and
High-Fructose Corn Syrup Prompts Considerably More Weight Gain, Researchers Find. And the corn mafia^W^WCorn Refiners Association is quick at pointing out flaws (1, 2) in the studies . This is close to ridiculous. Only one thing is better: http://www.sweetsurprise.com/. I mean if everything would be ok, why do I need to advertise that nothing is wrong . This page is generally very entertaining with regards to its independence (check “Science and Research” for anything negative, i.e., the two studies cited above; so far about “full list of results”). The wikipedia page is also worth a read. I’m simply amazed!

This week, I attended the Workshop on Large Scale Application Performance in Chicago. I was shocked when I arrived at HPDC (sidenote, I took the train again and it was great!): everything seemed to be about Cloud or Grid or a combination of those (+Life Science). I still don’t fully understand what all this stuff is about and what the fundamental scientific problems are. Well, the workshop was very good! I really enjoyed Barton Miller’s keynote about his MRNet research. It’s good work! I also enjoyed listening to the other workshop papers. My talk went really well (I was a bit over-time but that wasn’t bad). We (Timo, Andrew and me) even got the best paper award for our work! That was nice and unexpected.

All-in-all, it was a really good workshop!

I visited Argonne the next day and gave a talk about Next Generation Collective Operations. This was also very entertaining and it was great to be there. I had some really good conversations with some folks. Thanks for inviting me! I completely forgot to take a picture …

This weekend, I attended the Advances in Message Passing workshop and the Supercomputing 2010 PC meeting. AMP was in Toronto and the SC meeting in New Orleans. Well, and the schedule was suboptimal. I had to leave AMP early and catch the last flight from Toronto to New Orleans (7pm). But AMP was clearly worth it! It had a couple of very interesting papers and our own contribution fir very well too! I gave the talk together with Jeremiah (which was an experiment ) — and it was a complete success!
The hotel was also funny, it was inside a shopping mall, here’s the view “outside” the window:

Too bad that we had to leave early. Btw., I spent less than 23 hours in Toronto … and two of the in the US immigration! Yes, the US immigration is *in Toronto* (wtf!). And of course, we didn’t arrive two hours early at the airport … man, catching the plane was really close (they delayed it by 20 minutes because we were not the only ones who had that problem). This is really weird …

The SC meeting was very nice. I met many friends and colleagues and had many good discussions. New Orleans is not really the nicest place I have been to. I tried to save money and stayed in the “Bourbon Inn” — well, on Bourbon Street. I did not know what Bourbon street meant when I booked the hotel :-/. Well, it meant no sleep until around 3am . The street is full of night- and stripclubs … kind of odd when you walk back to the hotel after a full day of meetings. Well, I survived (and saved $150). Also, taking the bus to the airport was an adventure. I also survived this one . Bourbon street (the camera didn’t really work because it was *extremely* humid!).
Morning:

Afternoon:

I guess I have to mention the craziest PC meeting I attended so far: IPDPS’10. Cindy Phillips, the PC chair scheduled the meeting for Friday 12/6/09 in Albuquerque (a while ago). We met at 6:30am at the hotel (I flew in late the day before and didn’t get too much sleep … which wasn’t really too good. The meeting had only minimal breaks scheduled (10 mins breakfast, 30 mins lunch, etc.) and we started out very slow with the good papers (and spent way too much time on clear accepts – as usual ). Well, the conference also received a record-submission of more than 500 papers … my track (Software) was the heaviest. The meeting was very professionally managed by Cindy, good job! However, the number of submissions was just overwhelming. If we assume a 9 hour meeting, we would have about 1 minute per paper which seems very unrealistic. We spent on average more than three minutes and sometimes much longer. Well, it was evening by the time we were down to the complicated “middle-field”. All in all, the meeting took longer than 17 hours and was extremely exhausting. I think we made good decisions and selected a good program. It should have been a two-day meeting though .

However, IEEE made up for my stress and gave me a certificate of appreciation . See

The second strange thing since I moved here two months ago. Well, I was working as usual … and suddenly heard a really loud bang. My reaction was to check the weather (online) if there was a thunderstorm. Nope … ok, more working. Then I heard several Police sirens, and they stopped nearby. Of course, I checked and saw police cars next to my apartment. Eleven at night is not the typical time to socialize with your neighbors but everybody was on the street. There was a car wreck, a complete wreck! And some eye witnesses who told me that the crash happened probably after a pick-up which was speeding down Springfield (guessed >80 mph) apparently chased by a Sheriff hit another pick-up in the side. I was told that the driver of the one truck ran away naked (?) but was caught soon after. The other guy was pulled out of the second truck by the rescue unit. We hope he survived. Here are some pictures …

The truck on the right seems to have caused the accident.

Someone being arrested.

The truck was missing the back axis (!). The thing on the right is the tool-box and a wheel and an oil can were about 50m (!) away.

Some links:
http://www.wicd15.com/newsroom/top_stories/videos/wicd_vid_2281.shtml
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/courts-police-and-fire/2010-04-30/champaign-woman-killed-crash-bond-1-million-man-custody-dui.h
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/courts-police-and-fire/2010-05-01/man-accused-fatal-collision-has-long-court-history.html
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/courts-police-and-fire/2010-05-01/police-make-arrest-while-trying-rope-crash-site.html

We got our POWER7 780 (MR) System on Friday and I just logged in . I’m alone on something like this:

htor@bd01:~> w
 20:49:12 up 1 day,  1:01,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
USER     TTY        LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
htor     pts/0     20:35    0.00s  0.04s  0.01s w
htor@bd01:~> cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
cpu             : POWER7 (architected), altivec supported
clock           : 3864.000000MHz
revision        : 2.1 (pvr 003f 0201)

processor       : 1
cpu             : POWER7 (architected), altivec supported
clock           : 3864.000000MHz
revision        : 2.1 (pvr 003f 0201)
........
processor       : 127
cpu             : POWER7 (architected), altivec supported
clock           : 3864.000000MHz
revision        : 2.1 (pvr 003f 0201)

timebase        : 512000000
platform        : pSeries
model           : IBM,9179-MHB
machine         : CHRP IBM,9179-MHB

It’s SMT=4 though (so “only” 32 cores) but with sweet 128 GiB memory. With 4 FMAs per cycle, that’s 983.04 GF/s, nearly one TF in a single “rack” (that thing below)!

I particularly like the name … we all hope that the drop will quickly fill up a bucket full of water(s) .

(credits: Steve Kleinvehn, original)

Wow, the weirdest April 1st ever. I was just biking to UIUC and saw somebody jumping from one of the tallest buildings in Urbana-Champaign. Around 9:10am, he decided to jump from Burnham 310 (an 18-story apartment building) right when I was biking by (like every morning). I didn’t really see which floor he came from as I only heard him screaming. I believe I heard at least 2 seconds of scream with a Doppler Effect. I had enough time to locate him while falling down and hitting the flower-bed with numb noise about 20m away from me (I biked on the other street-side). I stopped in shock (there was another guy much closer who seemed also shocked, and a police car). Before I decided to go and see if the person was alive, I heard the ambulance (it took less than 60 seconds to arrive, amazing). From all I could see, he hit the ground head-first (seemed like from a height of 50m) so I wouldn’t expect that he was alive. I left the site after the ambulance arrived but I’m available for a police interview if needed (I don’t really know more than I wrote here though).

Update: it seems like the man survived even though he jumped twice (landed on the smaller building and jumped again).

Update 2: the man (a Civil Engineering Ph.D. candidate) died in the hospital.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/courts-police-and-fire/2010-04-01/person-jumps-upper-floor-burnham-310-building.html
http://www.dailyillini.com/news/champaign-urbana/2010/04/01/man-pronounced-dead-after-fall-from-18th-floor-window

Two pictures from the building:


and the broken window:

A month flew by (literally, it’s hard to believe that it’s already more than a month) since I started my new position at UIUC/NCSA. I really like it. We found a good apartment, Urbana-Champaign is much better than I imagined (the campus is really beautiful, especially at night), and the best is the really really good supply of fresh fruits and vegetables (shopping is more interesting here than in Bloomington due to the larger choice). I also like my office (I’m still not really settled down, but I’ll get there eventually). Here are some pictures:

my desk

the view from my office is the (very nice) parking garage

And the best thing here is that there is a fitness room just 40m from my office! It has a lot of nice weight-lifting equipment and even a shower (perfect):

Well, I had another crazy trip last week. I attended two meetings, one in Washington and another one in Poughkeepsie (yeah, I bet you don’t know where that is, it’s an IBM research lab close to Fishkill and about 1:30hrs north of New York City). So I flew to Washington and attended the first meeting (I learned that some subway stations close at 9pm without announcement). Then I flew back to IND because I already had this flight booked and it was cheaper to fly from IND to LGA (through DCA) than from DCA to LGA directly. Doesn’t make any sense but I could sit three hours in lovely airplanes before I arrived back at exactly the same terminal where I left in Washington. Anyway, I made it to LGA, La Guardia New York at 11pm in horrible rain. I got my car, got lost in the Bronx for 30 minutes and then made my way towards Poughkeepsie. The drive was horrible, I saw 30 cm of snow falling in just one hour (amazing) and I barely made it to the hotel before getting stuck.

Well, the meeting was great but I’m not supposed to report on this one (publicly).

Then, on Friday, I had another appointment at IBM TJ Watson, about 45 minutes away. But it kept snowing and Poughkeepsie lost power (they had candles in the hotel ). I left two hours early for IBM and barely made it on time, just to learn that TJ Watson was closed and our meeting was one hour late.

The blizzard was strong, all public transit stopped working, all schools and public institutions were closed and most companies too. The roads were barely passable, many freeways were closed — and I didn’t know where to go (I only had the rental car map which was kind of useless, however, my N810 really rescued me there!). Here are some impressions from the drive:

My rental car – I got a nice VW Beetle. Very powerful and the traction control was really worth it (I was the fastest on snowy streets).

The main streets (Highway 9) in the morning. All trucks were stranded.

The freeway entrance (I-84) – wow!

I-84 so far. Looks kind of free, isn’t it? Well, besides all those stranded trucks.

Well, that’s the end ot I-84: a cop who told me that the freeway was closed . Going back one mile in reverse is no fun (especially when you got cars coming from behind and the danger of getting stuck).

Here is a stuck and abandoned (and snowed in) car

Man, and those local people really don’t know how to drive. Most of them went with 20 mph. I was going 40-50 . Passing was kind of dangerous though :-/.

Simply beautiful. Notw how much snow was on the trees and how far they bent over.

Well, and many of them were just lying on the streets. This was rather dangerous too .

This was on freeway 232 – the tree was on two of the three lanes!! I nearly crashed into it.

Another big one on two lanes.

That’s how virtually all street signs looked like – really annoying if you don’t know where you are?

The entrance to IBM TJ Watson.

Well, this whole drive reminded me of GTA IV (thanks again to Microsoft for the xbox 360). Especially the Whitestone bridge in the Bronx … like GTA, but it was $5.50 toll instead of $5 .

A departure monitor in the La Guardia airport — 90% of all flights canceled.

Another one. That was bad.

But I heard the announcement that a plane that was delayed from the day before was leaving in five minutes to Indianapolis. I took my chance, ran to the gate agent and asked to be put on standby for this one. He told me the flight was full and I would have to hope that somebody didn’t show up. Well, and there were about a dozen people on standby waiting for their name to be called (I came last). So one guy wasn’t there — and they called my name (I was the one with highest status in line ) and I got on the flight. 1.5 hours before my scheduled departure (this flight was canceled though). And I made it home, still one hour before my scheduled arrival .

Some of my colleagues who chose to fly out of the closer but much smaller Westchester Airport were delayed by two days.

Didn’t you have that point in your life where you wanted to move to a city that sounds like a bottle full of alcohol? Yeah, that’s what we did. As mentioned before, we found a beautiful apartment near downtown Champaign and now we had to haul all our stuff there. My first plan was to take a pickup but Natalia fortunately convinced me to rent a moving truck. We chose Budget (mostly due to the unbeatable price of $170 for the one-way rental including unlimited miles and a rich set of insurance options). We got a 16 foot truck, well, if you’re like me then you have no idea what that actually means. For all Europeans: it’s a two-ton truck (gross total weight 8 tons), so very nice for moving:

Well, the truck was actually not the first part. We started with collecting all the c**p, aehem, nice things, I collected over the years in the living room:

Well, the living room wasn’t even enough …

Natalia helped with, aehem, did most of the packing (especially the numerous kitchen utensils):

Fortunately, we had some friends helping us to move (especially for the heavy stuff like the pull-out couch!):

Well, the truck was “well packed” :

We then drove up to Champaign (I planned to go through Indy to avoid curvy and bumpy roads, but I did not include I-465 in my calculation — I-465 is a completely broken mess and nearly destroyed my mirror!!!).

Well, we arrived good and nothing was damaged . We only had to buy a new shower curtain and some basic things to get started (total about $50). We’re still getting settled but I conclude that the move was a big success . Actually, Champaign is not as bad as it sounds. It offers many more and more exciting shopping opportunities than Bloomington. It also has a somewhat real (but unnecessary complicated) bus system. It seems pretty decent in general.

Btw., did you see all the snow on the pictures? Yes, it was about -10 degrees when we moved but that didn’t turn out to be a problem. It was not really cold after carrying all the stuff around . We started and 9:30am and finished at 6:30pm (finished meaning that we had all the stuff out of the truck).