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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The reason for my travel to India was attending the PPoPP conference which was held in conjunction with HPCA at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. Most keynotes and the opening session was shared between the two conferences and I really liked the concept of having a hardware and a programming conference jointly. It [...]