Torsten Hoefler’s blog

They should have called the place “Rainland” but ok, I brought an umbrella .
This week’s MPI Forum was very interesting! Marc Snir presented his convincing hybrid proposal. It’s really nice and orthogonal to the current standard. It needs some minor polishing and an implementation and seems ready to go.
We had some incremental discussions [...]

I finally finished a page where I put some topology maps of some of today’s supercomputers: http://www.unixer.de/research/topologies/. It has no real purpose, but it’s pretty! I hope you like it . Please let me know if you have a large system or know admins who are willing to donate topologies for my collection — [...]

I presented our initial work on Offloading Collective Operations, which is the definition of an Assembly language for group operations (GOAL), at ICPP’09 in Vienna. I was rather disappointed by this year’s ICPP. We had some problems with the program selection already before the conference (I’ll happily tell you details on request) and the final [...]

This year’s EuroPVM/MPI was held in Helsinki (not quite, but close to it). I stayed in Hanasaari, a beautiful island with a small hotel and conference center on it. It’s a bit remote but nicely surrounded by nature.
The conference was nice, I learned about formal verification of MPI programs in the first day’s tutorial. This [...]

I attended the Hot Interconnects conference for the second time and it was as great as last year! This conference is rather convincing because it is a single-track conference with only a small number of highly interesting papers. And still, the attendance is huge, unlike on some other conferences where people only come when they [...]

Sometimes I get to hear that computer science is not a real science, and sometimes I believe it myself. Science has many definitions and often refers to the scientific method that is used to systematically acquire and disseminate new facts about nature. I think in this sense, computer science has to be split in an [...]

The Computer Science Department at Indiana University is no more. I was told that it was one of the oldest CS departments in the US. Now, the webpage says “The Computer Science Department is now School of Informatics and Computing” which is not correct. It’s actually only division in the school formerly known as “School [...]

I just ran across Geoffrey Pullum’s “SCOOPING THE LOOP SNOOPER“. It’s certainly wort a read (and laugh)!

I’m just back from IPDPS 2009. Overall, it was a nice conference, some ups and downs included as usual. I had several papers at workshops from which I had to present three (I was planning on two only, but one of my co-authors fell sick and couldn’t attend). They were all very well received (better [...]

Yes, I had my commencement yesterday. I know, I got the Ph.D. six months ago, however, I didn’t have the time to visit last year’s commencement but still wanted to do it. I didn’t know what it would be like but it’s actually kind of fun (my roommate said “everybody looks like in Harry Potter” [...]