Last seven days or so have been quite busy and most of the busyness had to do with school/research work. After exchanging few emails and reading few manuals, I finally managed to run Atomistix Tool Kit (v2.0) on our beowulf cluster. It wasn’t easy by any means and I still have some work to do - in commonising the FlexLM thing. Currently, the cluster has three products whose license is managed via FlexLM and there needs to be just one lmgrd running. More importantly, lmgrd must start automatically after every reboot. I will work with our SysAdmins early next week to get his done. A graphical interface from atomistix, called Virtual Nano Lab, also gave me its share of troubles. Similar to Accelrys’ MS Visualizer, it can be installed on any number of machines but only one can be used at any given time. Another bugging issue with ATK is the following: when run in parallel, output is written N times and worse, there is no difference in CPU time for a single processor & multi-processor job. Could be improper parallelization or I may be missing something very obvious…

Couple of fellow graduate students did their prelims and our Department, as it has been the tradition, hosted Spring Feedback Pizza Party. Many of the new students complained about weather conditions and qualifiers, while yours truly, as usual, brought up physerver disk usage and aging issues. During this meeting, it was also mentioned that some old machines in the Physics Grad Lab would be replaced with new ones. Upon hearing this, after the meeting, I proposed to the department about using them to set up a Cluster Work Bench. When built, this cluster work bench will serve as good instructional resource, and other reasons for this proposal are as follows:

1. CPU cylces can be used instead of the machines sitting idle in some closet
2. People (faculty and students alike) who would like to learn building a clusters (a.k.a. getting their hands dirty), can do so
3. Research groups planning to have a cluster of their own, can learn proper usage techniques
4. Research groups that have a cluster already, may use it as a not-so-risky platform to test new compilations
5. Some others, who may not be in a position to afford a cluster, can get their research done
6. This set up can also be used for small Summer projects, course-work projects, etc
7. Since we (dept) need to pay for disposal, part of that disposal money can be used to pay for network connection

For the last few days, I have been somewhat occupied with preparing slides for the upcoming APS meeting in Baltimore, and we have couple of practice talks scheduled in the next week. Almost all preparations from my side are done - request for leave of absence, transportaion (air and local), list of talks to attend, list of other (non-research) things to do, complete mailing address of all people I am planning to visit (I still have to print driving directions though), … Hopefully, everything will go according to the plan. Preparations are also underway (thanks to Kyle Schneider) for attending the PenguiCon 4.0, in Livonia, just the weekend before Tech finals. I have nothing to worry about as I have no finals to take I am about to complete planning for the conference in Cochin (India), later this year - should be fun times, to meet my teachers and friends….

Coming to other things, Tech basketball teams (both men and women) lost in the GLIAC quarter-finals. David Otokpa has promised me to send his comments/suggestions about my photos and I am eagerly looking forward to that. I have also been planning to find a new place to live - not that there is anything wrong with the current place, but with quite a few friends planning to visit me in the next three semesters or so, it will be a good idea to have a separate place. I had signed a contract too, for a place in Hancock, but have requested them to cancel it as a result of some unforeseen circumstances. Over the last few days, I was informed about this website, kalyanvarma.net and the wildlife photos (in and around Karnataka, India) are just too good. I modified certain parts of my website, mostly related to photo gallery, to make them more user-friendly. After some struggle, searching around and LUG members’ help, I have managed to get Kannada fonts in Mozilla Firefox under Linux (Red Hat Enterprise). This means that I no longer have to boot my laptop in Windows just to read some of my friends’ blogs. A fellow graduate student told me the best computer-related joke ever….

When Microsoft finally makes a product that doesn’t suck, it will be a Vacuum Cleaner!

Until next time, have fun