The Blog

   Computers are your friends. They also make you friends...

Yesterday was spent in the labs again, only for 8 hours instead of three. We were learning MPI, which I mentioned previously. MPI is the "Message Passing Interface", which allows multiple copies of programs running on multiple CPUs to communicate with each other. That way, the different CPUs can all be performing different parts of a huge calculation, then one instance gathers up the results and spits them at the user.

Needless to say, it's pretty heavy stuff.

What this translates to is "I wrote a number of programs that could each run over four (or more, they were all scalable, though we learned that more isn't necessarily better) computers at once, so the computation only takes a quarter of the time it used to (give or take a bit)."

If it sounds interesting, it's because it is. For more info, see the course notes, which are the notes for yesterday's work. I'm always happy to expand on such stories via email, but I'm going to move on now.

I realised the other day that I haven't really spoken about my new computer. It's not an AlphaServer SC, but it is pretty nifty.

My computer is a sexy sexy iBook. It does all kinds of neat tricks. Like playing movies on the common room tv when there's nothing on foxtel, or surfing the internet from the refectory. Which is to say, I've loved having a laptop with me, because it's a computer, but it fits in my backpack (well, not my nice tiny backpack, but still, that's a small bag). I can blog from my classes if I want to (though not post the blog entries, as the wireless internet doesn't stretch to the computing building (go figure)).

My ibook runs all my favourite linux programs (including "frozen bubble"), it compiles and runs all the (non-supercomputer) code I've written myself, it manages to be compatible with most people's windows files, while still being very pretty to look at.

It makes me friends wherever I go, as all the geek boys at the conference want a mac (the less geeky geek girls don't get it), and the cool college party kids want one because it matches their iPods.

I'm Little Miss Popularity... Well, maybe not.

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