I knew this would catch your attention - before you come out all the way to Houghton to kill me, give me a fair chance to explain: I will start out with describing the title. SIESTA is not what you generally know it as - but it’s an acronym for Spanish Initiative for Electronic Simulations with Thousands of Atoms. But users around the globe have come to the conclusion that when they do use this SIESTA, they get enough time for a SIESTA! Now that we are clear about the first part of the title, let me go on to the second part. Global Warming - no hidden definitions or anything like that here. It is what you know it is - Global Warming.

Now, how are these two related to each other, you ask? Ever since changing majors from pure Physics to Engineering Physics, Santa (yeah, the Santa) has been bringing me a wonderful Christmas gift - a gift of a unique kind that nerds and geeks would understand and appreciate. Last year, in 2005 December, it was the solution to the bugging problem of VASP compilation. And since then, I have been a good person, tried to stay away from troubles and such blah blah blah… For the past few months, I have been attempting to compile two programs - SIESTA being one of them. And this time, for Christmas, Santa (yeah, the same Santa) completely forgot about my gift (solution to the bugging compilation/run time errors associated with SIESTA) - or so I thought.

Three weeks after Christmas and two weeks into the New Year, all of a sudden Santa stops by to deliver my gift! I finally get some workable solution to the problem - the one that’s been bugging me for over two months. And if you have been a regular reader of these entries, you would have read it here. Santa not only gave me my gift but also explained as to why I was the last person on his list. And therein lies the relation between global warming and SIESTA! According to Santa’s usual gift-distributing route, he starts from North pole, goes down to South pole via Houghton and returns back to North pole via Denver. But this time around, Houghton did not receive its usual share of snow by Christmas (global warming - makes sense?) thus forcing Santa to reverse his route. He went to South pole via Denver (they got all the snow in Christmas; global warming again - makes more sense?) and stopped in Houghton on his way back to North pole… We have been getting some snow off late and Lake Superior has started to freeze - at least near the shores…

Freezing Lake Superior Shores near Baraga, MI

Freezing Lake Superior Shores near Baraga, MI

Well, Santa did his part and so did /me - I have spent countably infinite hours and attempts to compile these programs and quite many people (around the globe) have helped in this regard - some directly and some indirectly. Though the problem still has some unexplicable inconsistency when it comes to running on multiple processors, what helped the most were the ones shown in the picture below - a lot of them too:

Coffee, Chai and Beer — Catalysts in Compilation

Well, it is here that my semi-treatise on the relation between SIESTA and Global Warming ends - if you haven’t realized that the latter is affecting your lifestyle, aspirations, compilations, and such - be warned - you have been living in your own damned sweet little universe. It’s about time to wake up and do something about it - so that I get my Christmas gifts on time