Disclaimer #0

Not liking something is NOT THE SAME as hating it.
With above point in mind, I do not like MS Word - reasons for not liking it could actually be another blog entry and I will reserve it for some other day.
With first point still in mind, I do not dislike and/or hate people who [...]

Why HPL?
Citing Loreto et al. of MIT, a (super) computer must solve a (random) dense system of linear equations, as prescribed by the Linpack Benchmark, to be be ranked in the Top 500 List. Linpack provides a performance measure in GFlops (billions of floating point operations per second) that can be/is used for ranking. Although [...]

Well, some of you have been regular readers (and commentors) for my ramblings in this part of the e-world and such of those have known that I have been in Europe - Jülich, Germany - to be precise. However, while chatting with few of my friends, I noticed an incoherent idea as to why yours-truly [...]

The Journey
For those of you who have been quite regular at reading these posts, my trip to Germany is kinda old news. Unlike my previous attempt, weather gods in UP (Michigan’s Upper Peninsular) were more than kind and none of the flights had any technical difficulty (FYI - technical difficulty does not necessarily/always mean technological [...]

Part 1: Houghton, MI –> Minneapolis, MN
Part 1: Houghton, MI –> Marquette, MI
Well, some of you might have known about this for a while - either heard from me directly or read in my recent blog entry. Anyways, I got the VISA last Sunday (which, in itself, was rather surprising), got all the required paper [...]

Though I had some intention of seeing this city at least once in my life (yeah, I had never attempted to go there since my arrival in 2002) but never had any intention nor plans to see it in winter… or so I thought. Things shaped up in such a way that I needed some [...]

Sir Isaac Newton was certainly wrong when he (or some one before him) postulated that time flows at a pre-determined, uniform pace…. And though contrary of this statement/postulate has been my experience on more than handful of occasions, it has rarely been bitter than in the past three weeks. Time during this period has flown [...]

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 [...]

For the past several days, I have been attempting to compile two programs - on our group’s beowulf cluster - but with not much success. There are a variety of issues associated with these programs and some are as follows:

SMEAGOL 1.0 (the second program) has SIESTA 1.3 as its core.
Neither of these programs can be [...]

Week following my trip to the holy Lambeau Field (Wembley / Lord’s of American Football) was quite hectic. Research work progressed smoothly enough inspite of yet another scheduled power outage, the RAID setup in my server continued to bother me before Thanksgiving break started. Talking about Thanksgiving, this was the first such event in last [...]

Like I mentioned in the previous entry, /me has been in Spokane (Washington State) to attend a workshop. I will try to keep this entry pretty short but fill them up with photographs, so that you get a better picture of what happened:
Accommodation was perfect - ambience of Montvale Hotel, apart from pretty good [...]

Before I go on and write good things, as usual, I must write about bad things. Like I mentioned in my previous entry, all the excitement I had about Bangalore vanished into thin air (or thick smoke, to be precise) within few minutes into the traffic. These certain bad things and some good things need [...]

Well, my blog is kinda becoming a weekly update of things that happened and I am not too happy about it - I would rather write about certain something in great detail than making it look like a Wal*Mart Super Center but it will be a while before I get there. This Wal*Mart approach also [...]

It was very hard, sports-wise, to wait few more days to play the first softball game of Summer 2006. Worst thing was that whenever we planned to have a practice session, weather-gods played spoilsport. Finally, my waiting times came to an end on Tuesday as Grace Lutheran faced Houghton Baptist in the Church League opener. [...]

It has been a while since this page saw any updates and quite many things have happened since then. Let me start with where I ended the last entry. I managed to fine tune my presentation for the Sigma Xi Student Research Colloquium just in time - being the only Mac user helped a [...]

Just like all through the week, I woke up quite early and reached BCC around 7 am, via Burger King - mostly because I wasn’t able to connect to Days Inn wireless network. Editing few slides and making sure that contents in all slides had the same speed took about an hour and the session [...]

This was another long, intially boring but interesting later. As usual, I got up early, did somethings I had been meaning to do for a while (no, nothing special - just laundry) and headed towards the BCC. After a couple of talks, it was about time to feed myself. So, I headed towards Burger King [...]

Having spent quite a bit of time in vain yesterday night, attempting to use the wireless network in Days Inn, I woke up this morning under the impression that the problem might have solved by iteself — wrong, problem was intact and that forced me to be in the Convention Center way before my usual [...]

Another day that started quite early and I had to be at the Mariott Water Front Hotel before 7.30 for a breakfast meeting, organized by CSWP/FIAP (Committee on the Status of Women in Physics / Forum for Industrial and Applied Physics). People, as usual, were friendly and round-table discussions about general topics with Dr. Amy [...]

Like yesterday, I woke up quite early around 5.30 am and having an early start to the proceedings was fun. Much of the morning was spent in attending talks/presentations and many were pretty good. Some, however, were quite dull and put the audience back in Monday Greys (yeah Grey - Blue is a bright color [...]

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 [...]

It has been a relatively easier week so far - the most important thing to happen was the Engg. Physics Qualifiers. Since then, it has been cruise control, sort of. The presentation, in my personal opionion, went on lot better than I expected and this, as far as I can remember, is the only one [...]

It has been nearly eight days since I posted and trust me, quite a few things got done during this time. Having made some (not much) progress in manuscript on Thursday and part of Friday, weekend started off with a party Our department’s annual potluck. Couldn’t believe there were so many people and the [...]

One of the important things that we (in our research group) had in our plan was to get parallel version of CRYSTAL 2003 working on our beowulf cluster. Working with Dr. Orlando (one of the authors of this program), I managed to get both serial and parallel versions, and good news is that they both [...]

This too had been on my menu for about nearly two months and finally got it done a couple days ago. Here’s what I wanted to do — my Yahoo! mail gets downloaded to /var/spool/mail/use-name and any system-mail (from root or other users) also gets appended to this. I can read this mail via Pine [...]

This had been a bugging problem for quite a while - not being able to run some codes in a parallel fashion. I knew how to compile MPICH with PGI compilers and also knew compiling VASP with MPI, but what I did not know (or was not sure about) was the following : Will a [...]

For those of you who don’t know what Räma is, it’s a dedicated beowulf linux cluster that we built in our group. We started working on it around second week of January and it took nearly six months for it to work (currently in 32 bit mode) under its own front-end. The very concept of [...]

Spring 2005 just ended and it has been a memorable semester for many reasons. I got through the Physics Qualifiers in early January and started working on building a Beowulf linux cluster in our research group; I (actively) participated in (most of the) LUG meetings and Install-A-Thon; attended APS March Meeting in Los Angeles, meeting [...]

I got up around 5.30 am and after leaving Dr. Yap, Dr. Ranjit (from Wilshire Grand) and Dr. Jena (from Ramada Inn) in the airport around 6.45 am, I came back and drove to Malibu - driving along Pacific Coast Highway was a memorable experience and so was the time I spent in one of [...]

Like almost every day in this week, I got up early and was in LACC by 7.45 am. I updated my diary while waiting for Dr. Ranjit’s call. He did call around 8.15 am - I walked back to Quality Inn, picked Dr. Ranjit and Dr. Senapati from Wilshire Grand and drove them to Beverly [...]

I got out of sleep around 4 am, and was in Wilshire Grand around 4.45 am to take Dr. P to the ariport. Fortunately, I did not miss any exits and we were in LAX within 20 minutes or so. I was in LACC around 7.30 am and for some strange reason, did not attend [...]

I woke up around 5.30 am and was in LACC by 7.30 am, had StarBucks coffee, updated my diary before going on to attend some talks (Dr. Perger at 12 pm, Dr. Jena’s group afterwards, and couple of talks on education between 1 and 2 pm). I had the same food (veg. panini) and prepared [...]

I got up around 5.30 am and went to Wilshire Grand to pick up Dr. P at 7 am - I met Venkat (and his friends) in Quality Inn, while having breakfast. We all walked upto LACC and I met Anil - after discussing usual things with him for a while, we went to attend [...]

I got up around 5.30 am, went to Wilshire Grand to pick Haiying up and brought her back to Quality Inn. I then dropped both of them, along with two other Indonesians, at the convention center and drove back to hotel. It turned out to be a good thing that I went to check the [...]

After lot of innovative attempts that failed, I compiled Gaussian03 successfully on Laxmi - using the trial version of PGI v5.2 compilers. I also managed to install GaussView on couple of machines. Attempts to compile the same on Shiva failed every time. May be the error is something to do with portability?? My guess could [...]

It has been a long time since I got up really early on a Saturday morning and today, I had to because of the Sigma Xi Multi-disciplinary Research Colloquium. It started off early, around 8.30 am and went on till about 1 pm. Almost all presentations were clear, crisp, well thought out and pertained to [...]