The Blog

   I (heart) robots...

So, anyway, talking about the robot in the mass data storage device. Okay, picture a normal little room within a big room, only this room is a dodecahedron (try spelling that three times fast). There's a window to the room, and it's all dark, with only a few lights illuminating the labels on the thousands of tape drives on the pillar within. Then, a huge collection of red LEDs swing past the window, as the robot arm picks up one of the tape drives, swings back around the pillar and puts it in the reader. How sweet is that?

Okay, maybe I'm getting a little too excited. We also met a little supercomputer consisting of a cluster of 152 linux boxen (well, Dell boxen running linux to be more precise), each running as a node in a pretty sweet system. They were only connected to the controller nodes by standard network interfacing, rather than anything fancy (see also: expensive and uberfast), but they are used for a lot of really interesting stuff. Or so I'm told, I haven't got an account on the machine to test it for myself.

So, then we met "SC". It's a pretty cute system, really. All hidden away in racks that say "compaq" on them in huge letters. With big chunky cabling that runs for metres under the false floor and arranged into "hot" and "cool" aisles so that the ventilation system (also primarily operating under the floor) can keep everything at the perfect temperature (and humidity, which is something I wouldn't have thought of. Air-conditioned air is usually very dry, but dry air causes computers to spark, so the air around an expensive supercomputer has to be kept at something around 45% humidity, to keep everything working at it's optimal specs). The worst bit was that I was wearing a dress, and all the vents in the floor kept blowing it up Marilyn Munroe style. How embarrassment.

Before I get offtopic, for more information about the facilities we're using, you can visit this website. Yesterday we got to write simple programs that run on the outer nodes of the SC.

But speaking of dresses, there are four girls here with me. Wendy is a friend of mine, and Jackie I met at the Harley Wood Winter School last year. I haven't met the others yet, but I'm sure I will. There are 38 people in the course, out of 80 applications, and neither Wendy or I are particularly sure why we were picked for such a selective group. I suspect that for me it was a combination of my supervisor and the Astrophysics Effect (where saying that you do astrophysics gets you more credit than you really deserve), and Wendy thinks it's because she's doing something similarly odd (Medical Physics).

Anyway, time to go to class. Today we're playing with the supercomputer again, using something called "MPI".

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