They were also neither patted down nor searched. So I asked about that. The agent replied “Flight crews on duty never go through the scanner.”. First, I asked how they know that they’re flight crews (cf. “Catch me if you can”). Well, apparently a uniform and some form of plastic badge is ok (no list or barcode or anything). I didn’t get a reply to my question “why” (especially if there was no line!) .

I guess people dressed up in uniforms with some form of airline ID are much more trustworthy than other fellow travelers. Also, this may be some for of admitting that those scanners are affecting people’s health. Well well.

Even the hpc-ch blog and Inside-IT.ch reported on it.

The ETH Board has appointed the following individuals as professors: Torsten Hoefler [...], currently Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, USA, as Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) of Computational Science. Torsten Hoefler is internationally regarded as one of the leading young scientists in the field of high-performance computing. At the University of Illinois, he is currently involved in the development of one of the world’s most efficient supercomputers. His research interests focus on system design, programming and efficiency analysis. Torsten Hoefler will provide the Department of Computer Science, the research focus “Scientific Computing and Simulation” and the CSCS (Swiss National Supercomputing Centre) with important stimuli. [...]

I listed some conferences and journals that are in the HPC or Supercomputing field (I published in most of them) with their average citations per paper and their AUS ranking. This data was mainly for my own reference, however, several people asked me to publish this list, thus I will do this here. This list is not intended to be complete and, most importantly, the rankings do not represent my personal opinion (you have to ask me for this ); all data is based on the database from Microsoft Academic Search link queried on Dec. 3rd 2011. The age of the conference (as shown in MS Academic Search) is in brackets. Feel free to contact me if you think that anything is missing, incomplete or erroneous.

Conferences

Related Conferences

Journals

So I got a brand-new 32 inch Toshiba flat-screen TV for just $260 (for the Europeans, that’s about 190 EUR) instead of $340 … I think it’s an amazing deal. The way to get it without a line is to drive to a small shop in a small town which still has one or two Black Friday deals. In this case, it was a very small Radio Shack in Savoy, IL. Worked great!

The TV even has two HDMI and one VGA input. Actually, I’m not really using it as TV anyway, just as a very large (and cheap) monitor .

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!

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.

Original Source

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!

Well, I did it again, I booked a Lufthansa flight to save a university that invited me about 1.000 dollars. Well well, now I regret it painfully (again). It’s incredible how bad this can be. Well, first the airport in Zurich, no signs to Lufthansa whatsoever. You have to guess that it’s in check in area 1, which is, by the way, at the furthest point of the airport. Ok, fine, the airport can be improved (I will fill out a feedback form). But then you realize while standing in the first class line at the Lufthansa counter (I have Star Alliance Platinum status now) that the woman who entered the economy lane five minutes after me was already walking to gate … well, clearly, if there are 9 open counters in economy and one in first class (four more were not manned) it will be slower. Fine.

I was also missing mileage credit for a flight to the US and Lufthansa did not reply to any of the three emais I sent them in the last month . Well, so I decided to go to the ticket-desk to ask about missing miles for a past flight to the US. After a long discussion, I learned that United sold me a class K ticket (which was mentioned nowhere). And apparently only Miles&More customers get 50% miles to fly in this class and other Star Alliance customers (e.g., US) get nothing. Great, I just lost more than 5000 qualifying miles! Well, I wanted to get at least the 50% mileage credit on my Miles&More account, but guess what? When I checked in as a US customer, I lost this chance!? Oh well, I was actually careful while booking this ticket because I already lost 50% mileage credit before. This is why I booked a United flight … but yeah, it was operated by Lufthansa! How much I hate this airline now…

And it’s getting better. I am sitting right next to the toilet in nearly the last row (57) here because they didn’t bother to check me in with a reasonable seat (keep in mind that I checked in at the first class counter and asked repeatedly for a better seat).

Also, they threw me out of the lounge 60 minutes before the flight departed to allow for additional US securiy screening. Well, fine, not their fault. But when I arrived at the gate, Lufthansa employees directed me to bypass the additional security directly to the gate (with all those dangerous liquids in my luggage ). When I asked if this is some kind of extra priority lane, I was told “we don’t talk about this”. I am seriously wondering what the US TSA would think about this. For the record, this was LH 434 departing from Gate H08 in Munich to Chicago. Well, I was now standing 30 minutes at the silly gate (additional seat-change requests were not successful).

I am wondering what happens next. My only advice is now: just don’t fly Lufthansa.