Torsten Hoefler's blog » Science

An SC11 story – walking by OccupySeattle and Space Needle …

htor — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 01:52:08 +0000

A couple of days ago was one of those nights where I went back from the parties to my (slightly remote) hotel. I was passing OccupySeattle every day … but this time it was full of police. The funniest part was that the cops told me to leave while I was just walking by … I mean, seriously, I didn’t even stop. Actually, they stopped me in order to tell me to leave. I didn’t think it was worth mentioning until I saw this. I think the whole movement is really fed by such stories in a very grim way.

The movement is interesting and the Seattle one is especially noteworthy since the weather is really bad.

Well, well … very strange. Btw., the conference was absolutely great! Well, it was a bit too small (crowded) and the Party in the Space Needle was rather disastrous (reminded me a bit of the SC08 Texas thing without food). It was the opposite though this time — there was a lot of excellent food and drinks, but there was simply no space to stand. And getting up the needle was a 1-hour effort, well, Jim and I found a secret shortcut . Here is the proof:

SC11 is over now! And we even had a 1.5 hours break before SC12 started for the committee . It was a great show, bigger, better everything. ~5k people in the technical program and ~12k total.

PS: I know that Mount Rainier and the Space Needle can not fit on a picture like this … it’s called artistic freedom!

Next year’s plans

htor — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:28:31 +0000

Many knew that I was planning my return to Europe since the beginning of this year. I want to remark again that my move is exclusively motivated by personal reasons; I like the US and especially UIUC and my alma mater IU very much. I applied about a year ago to the Assistant Professor position at ETH and some time after that to the Helmholtz (HGF) Junior Investigator group program with the Juelich Supercomputing Center. Btw., this was the first (and second) time that I applied for something in my
life—I somewhat slid into all other jobs and programs.

Against all odds, both applications succeeded and both offers were extremely close regarding the funding. Now I was facing the paradox of choice (see Schwartz and his talk). This was horrible because I knew that both places invested in me and I had to disappoint somebody. I hate this, seriously.

Juelich is *the* top supercomputing center in Europe and ETH is *the* top research university in (mainland) Europe (with people like Einstein as alumni). It was a very hard choice and I took some time to make it final.

Since my career-goal is to be a professor at a research university, I decided to accept the position at ETH. The environment and colleagues also seem very very promising. I hope my friends in Juelich understand my decision.

So now it’s official. I’ll move to Zuerich, Switzerland (most likely) in August next year to start a position as Assistant Professor at the ETH Zuerich.

A view of Juelich. I like the natural forest setting a lot!

Views of ETH and Zurich.

The new ACM SIGHPC!

htor — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:05:13 +0000

We (the CS researchers working on parallel computing and HPC) finally made it! We got our own special interest group in ACM — SIGHPC. I think it’s a great opportunity for us to have a forum for the HPC researchers. I joined immediately.

UIUC’s CITES – wow …

htor — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:20:27 +0000

I know, it seems like I’m only complaining in my blog in the last weeks … but seriously, something like this never happened to me before. You know, UIUC is a top-5 department in computer science and it is really astonishing how incompetent CITES (Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services) is.

For some unclear reason, they decided that running an IMAP and STMPS server must be too hard so they switched the mail service to Microsoft Exchange (yes, a public university!!!). Well, I am rather sure that every grad student in the department would be able to run an IMAP or SMTPS service. But ok, anyway, so they switched my mail account. The account was 100% forwarded to another mailserver (NCSA) with a good old .forward file . So I was assuming it didn’t work and sent regular test-emails to my mailadress. They made it.

But I realized today that some emails (every 10th, most come from @illinois.edu) are not forwarded but delivered to my Outlook Inbox (which I never checked). All of them went to the same email address htor@university.edu. This is so unbelievably bad that I missed a whole thread of important discussions with admins (involving grant money). This is really bad …. and they won’t let me run my own SMTP server .

Thanks for the trouble CITES!

HotI Aftermath

htor — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:48:45 +0000

Here is a nice video-interview of Fabrizio during HotI this year: http://insidehpc.com/2011/08/26/22573/. Enjoy!

Hot Interconnects 2011 teaser and highlights!

htor — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:28:27 +0000

Rich Brueckner from insideHPC interviews the Co-Chairs of HotI’11 (Fabrizio Petrini, Patrick Geoffray, and I) in a podcast. Citing one of the chairs “Listen to it, it’s fun! Three horrible accents but a great program!” .

http://insidehpc.com/2011/07/28/podcast-hot-interconnects-conference-looks-to-the-future-of-networks/

Visiting ETH Zurich

htor — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 01:34:37 +0000

I visited ETH Zurich at the end of last month. Zurich is probably one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and definitely one of (if not the) most expensive city . Public transit is just a dream, I believe one really doesn’t need a car around the city (I know multiple people who live there and don’t have a car). The city is very hilly (I had to climb 1000 stairs to get from the main train station to my hotel, quite workout ). ETH itself sits majestically on top of a hill and offers a beautiful view. Especially the Professor’s lunch area, on top of the main building has an absolutely stunning view on the city and the lake. I also had many very interesting technical discussions and like the CS department there. Here are some pictures:

The gate to the computer science and chemistry building.

The entrance to the computer science building, all very impressive. The doors must weigh a ton but they are automatic (not like in Chemnitz where one really has to move the heavy doors ).

The majestic main building. I gave my talk here.

View of the city from the main building.

Another view of the city.

The main building’s back entrance .

Teaching CS498 at UIUC

htor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 17:16:08 +0000

I have been appointed as Adjunct Assistant Professor in Computer Science at UIUC since last year. My first service to the CS department is teaching the lecture CS498 “Hot Topics in HPC: Networks and Fault Tolerance” together with Franck Cappello this semester. It is the first class that I teach in the US academic system and it is a bit different from what we used to do in Germany. Classes are generally smaller (I have around 20-25 students, some of which do not take credit) which enables a more interactive teaching style. In my networking part, I start with focusing on the theoretical foundations and models for communication and then show practical examples for each of them and how the knowledge can help practical setting. I think it’s most important to understand the basics (this is also harder to learn and understand from textbooks than the technical details) before diving into practical networks. Teaching this class has been a lot of fun so far even though the preparations are really weekend-time consuming. I really enjoy the interactions with the students during class.

I’m teaching the class every Wed and Fri 9:30-10:45am in Siebel 1103. If anyone is interested in the content, check out the class webpage at http://www.unixer.de/CS498/ .

SC10 Best Paper

htor — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 16:32:49 +0000

Yes, we received the SC10 Best Paper Award for our paper “Characterizing the Influence of System Noise on Large-Scale Applications by Simulation”. Congratulations also to Timo and Andrew! SC10 is the premier international venue for HPC research and development. Only 50 of the 253 submitted papers have been accepted at SC10 and it was very nice to hear that our paper was one of the best paper nominees (each track nominated a best paper), but I didn’t expect that we would be best of all the nominees! The final decision was made after the presentations. My talk was in a way too small room which was completely packed (people were standing at the wall and sitting on the floor in the aisle). The room was “allowed to” host 150 people (sign at the wall) but there were at least 250 in there . Glad that there was no firefighter around. Well, the air got rather bad after ten minutes . The talk itself went extremely well, I was right in time and the audience had a lively discussion that I merely moderated (many questions trying to pinpoint flaws were actually answered by the audience ). That was really enjoyable.

Generally, I really enjoyed SC this year, I have had so many meetings that I was barely able to check the show-floor for goodies. New Orleans was also great (well, my hotel was, let’s say “suboptimal”, but it was very cheap). I’m looking forward to next year!

PROPER 2010/EuroPar Workshop in Ischia, Italy

htor — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:46:40 +0000

I am just back from the PROPER workshop in conjunction with EuroPar in Ischia. I have to say that it was absolutely awesome and want to thank my sponsors, Andreas Knuepfer and VI-HPS, again. The joy was even multi-dimensional, first, my keynote went very well and inspired many new ideas. Second, the following talks inspired even more ideas (especially Allen’s presentation). Third, the place was just beautiful (it was somewhat strange to be in a resort among the tourists and talk about CS topics. Fourth, I met many old friends and colleagues and also got to talk to Arnold Rosenberg about graph separators briefly. I loved it even though the travel was very stressful. My travel to Ischia took 25 hours (driving by car to IND, flying to Paris-CDG, flying to NAP, taking the bus to the ferry, ferry to Ischia, Bus to the hotel). The way back was the same order of magnitude. Given that I stayed only 36 hours on the island, the trip seems rather crazy. But hey, I had no jetlag after coming back .

Here are some impressions:
The hydrofoil ferry seemed pretty fast but wasn’t actually. Well, I fell asleep immediately after a 23 hours travel without any sleep.

The room where I presented the keynote .

The food was awesome! Fish, fish and more fish. Even fish-fries (which tasted like french, aehem freedom fries and were somewhat addictive).

The main attraction on Ischia. Well, I didn’t actually find the time to visit it, too much chatting going on … but I’ll probably get there another time.