Torsten Hoefler’s blog

Well, it was funny, I had a lot of air travel during the last weeks and nothing went wrong. Somewhat suspicious! And yes, on the *last* flight, the horrible happened.

I was supposed to fly from Austin to Indianapolis on Thu 5pm and arrive at 10:30pm. Looked like a great flight when I was booking it. Well, well. I was waiting in the Continental President’s club in Austin (which
sounds much better than it actually was) when they announced that the Houston airport had to shut down due to a hurricane. Oh well, my flight was “delayed” they didn’t even know until when. The plane was stuck in Houston. Actually, it got stuck right after it pushed back from the gate. The poor folks in the plane were waiting 2.5 hours in the plane on the runway. Btw., it is a 30 minute flight between Austin and Houston (and a 2 hour drive ).

Anyway, so my plane was arriving at an unclear time. So I checked alternatives and there was a 6:45 plane going to Houston. The lounge folks couldn’t help and told me to ask at the gate. Well, so I got in
line (a horribly long line). 30 minutes later I reached an agent and in the meantime the other plane arrived. The 6:45 was already boarding at that time. The agent tried to get rid of me and told me that the other flight would board in a minute. Well, I convinced her to give me the last middle seat anyway. Haha, apparently, a new hurricane arrived in Houston in the meantime, so we had to wait 30 more minutes in the plane. I thought my flight to IND was gone for sure. We arrived three hours late in Houston. The airport was a complete mess (reminded me of Bangalore or Mumbai, thousands of desoriented people).

So I missed the (delayed) IND flight by 10 minutes . Darn! The service counter was sorrounded by about 1000 angry folks, so I it was useless to wait (was already 10pm). So I decided to get out of this
airport. The next and last flight in roughly the right direction was leaving 10:15 to Chicago, so I ran to the gate. I asked there if they would deliver my luggage home if I went to Chicago. But well, “if a
passenger leaves his route voluntarily, the luggage will not be delivered”. Ok, it also turned out that *ALL* flights to Indianapolis on the next day were full, so I would have to stay two nights!! And the
hotel is not covered because it’s due to bad weather conditions. Oh man, so I took the last seat (middle seat in the last row of the plane) and go to Chicago … but I got a first-class ticket to Indianapolis after
complaining enough (Staralliance status helps for some things). And apparently, my luggage made it to the connection flight that I missed. I am baffled how my luggage can be faster than I was (running!!)??? Oh well.

I convinced the Continental gate agent to give me a hotel voucher (again, Staralliance status came in handy) at the Westin O’Hare. Well, I had the voucher but there was no shuttle at 2am and the Westin didn’t have a phone in the shuttle center (WTF!?). So I took a cab for only $20 . Well well.

After four hours of sleep, I went back to the airport with a horrible headache. Yeah, and, great! The flight to IND was delayed by 2 hours. Well, it’s again only a 30 minute flight/2 hour drive). Oh well. So now
I’m in this half-hour flight, sitting in mediocre first class but I guess I’ll make it now (finally!) after a slight delay of 15 hours. Hope my luggage is really there. I just want to get home at this point.

My luggage was there but rather crushed … my best advice for now is: avoid flying!

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

It’s just nice when you login to your machine and see something like:


11:50:20 up 919 days, 19:21, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.10, 0.08
[Mon Aug 29 11:50:20] htor@benten:~


One can make some conclusions:

• 919 days no power outage (the server is hanging off a normal outlet)
• there were numerous network outages during this time
• the software raid also went on a rampage and halted the system for half a day (but came back afterwards)
• 919 days no kernel upgrade (I don’t know of any remote exploits for the running kernel, I won’t tell the version though )
• the hardware (including the disks which make a strange sound since about a year) is rather robust (given that I got the machine from the department’s “dumpster”). The HDs will probably die once they stop spinning .

HotI was again a huge success this year! Intel’s facilities were very professional and video recording was just amazing (they had a full camera crew of 5 people including one producer on site). I enjoyed it a lot! And I’ll do one more year of TPC Co-Chair in 2012.

In the meantime, there was also another news article about the conference: EETimes. Unfortunately, I’m slightly mis-quoted but it’s not that bad (but who would built a 17-d Torus, not sure where this came from ).

So consider using it! It’s great! Even insideHPC says so: MPI 2.2’s Scalable Process Topologies.

More press coverage: http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-08-03/silicon_valley_symposium_heats_up_discussion_of_high_performance_interconnects.html

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/

Ok, so I guess I just felt what 40 degrees celsius and 80% humidity feel like . It’s amazing here. There is a heat-wave in the US and Illinois is one of the hottest states. But I’m still man enough to survive without AC at home (ceiling fans work wonder, even at 35 degrees celsius inside!).

My other planned summer vacation fell through (of course after I booked my ticket to Europe ). Yes, I was planning a vacation (believe it or not). Vacation means that I may only read email once a day . Anyway, so I invited a friend and we decided to do the tourist thing in Germany, actually, more around the area where my parents live (Saxony). Obviously, I lived in this area for quite a while but it was very nice to actually explore it! So the tour was: Bautzen, Goerlitz, Munich (I had to apply for a new US visa there … and my iPad was stolen …), Koenigsstein, and Dresden! It was all very beautiful! Not much to say besides the commented pictures below .

Huh, I came back home from a longer trip and, instead of dying, my citrus plant (not even sure what it is, either orange or grapefruit) was blooming! One step further towards the master gardener .