Well, today was the official start of the conference and unfortunately, it didn’t get off to a really great start for me. I planned on taking the conference bus to the convention center this morning but because of a problem finding my badge, I ended up driving over so as not to be late. Ok, this shouldn’t have been a big issue except for the fact that I actually found the official convention parking center and it cost $9.50 for half a day instead of the $5.00 for the parking lot I found yesterday. Then, I ended up getting a huge migraine that made me sick to my stomach and so although I wanted to make every effort to stick it out, I had to leave around 2pm because I felt like I was going to hurl. Note to self: do not go anywhere without Excedrin. I thought I was going to die.
After getting back to the hotel I took two Excedrin and fell into bed to try and sleep off the headache. It took me about 30 minutes to fall asleep but at least I couldn’t feel the headache much after that. I woke up 3 hours later and although my head and neck were still a little sore, I felt good enough to give Marshall a call. We talked for about an hour and then I decided to go downstairs and see if I could find some food. There are no grocery or fast food stores in the vicinity so I’m pretty much stuck with whatever is in the hotel. I just spent $28 on a swordfish dinner. The salmon would have been $25 so I figured I’d rather go with the fish that I enjoy more. Hopefully it tastes as good as it cost. =P
Well, it’s about time for me to go downstairs and pick up my food. I could have had it delivered to my room but you know me, I’m cheap. 😉
As for what I learned in the half a day of tutorial that I made it through, most of it was review but there was some new and helpful information. Namely, I learned and started to understand the difference between SMP systems and traditional clusters. OpenMP is used for coding for SMP and MPI is used for traditional clusters. SMP systems have shared memory which is what always confused me since our new dual processor nodes will build an SMP kernel so I didn’t understand how that worked with MPI on top. When we run our clusters, we do not run with the SMP kernel and now I understand why. Unlike MPICH, OpenMP is not downloadable but comes with the compiler you purchase like Portland Group for example.
An emerging cluster type is a hybrid cluster that clusters SMP systems that use OpenMP with other SMP systems using MPI. I believe this is how we will cluster the IBM HS20s. We shall see.
Finally, one of the instructors in this class was Christiana Jablonowski who visited PCMDI in 2003. I introduced myself and let her know that I was interested in learning more about grid technologies since PCMDI heavily uses that technology for the Earth Systems Grid (ESG) project.
Well, I’ve got my swordfish which is cooked perfectly for me (dry) and am settling in for a quite evening. Perhaps I’ll be able to finish knitting that sock. One can hope. Goodnight everyone. =)