My New Buddy: Vacuum Cleaner

It was delivered two days ago but I just had time to try it this morning.


Compared to my old one, which is very heavy and used to be powerful, but for some reason, it now does not pick anything.


It is small and light, which is good for my small room.

Once upon a time with a lost pup

She got lost from somewhere. Aig and Mon found her in front of our apartment. She was wet all over but still hyperactive. Aig and Mon were leaving for Austin, so they could not keep her. I took care of her for a while before deciding that I should went out to ask if someone lost a pup. Fortunately, our neighbor came home. They had had a dog so I asked them whether they could keep her. Fortunately again, while we was chatting the owner of the dog came by and picked her up.

Seattle Day 6-7: A Pleasant Journey

It was the first morning at La Quinta which is a little bit far from the conventional center but they had breakfast. Though it was not too far to walk.

At the conference, I attended Checkpoint Optimization session and learned that whatever you would show on the screen, you had to be able to justify it clearly. The assumptions should be rationally clarified.

After that I went to a job fair. There were many national labs, universities, and industrial companies that came to recruit. Most of them had internships. Some of them also had post-doctoral positions. I had a great opportunity talking to Argonne NL, they were going to buy a huge cluster called BlueGene/P. Then they would need us soon.

Los Alamos NL was pretty interesting. I knew it when Clayton went there for an internship couple of years ago. Lawrence Livermore had a biggest booth there. They had many positions opened.

Some other NLs were also interesting, like NOAA, Lawrence Berkeley, etc. There were even a lab from Singapore and King Abdullah University from Saudi Arabia. They tried to present themselves a lot.

I spent a lot of time at the job fair. Unfortunately I did not bring my resume and business cards with me. I had not had intention to find a job at first but it turned out that I was pretty excited talking to those people (esp with a guy from Argonne).

Late afternoon, I went to Cray booth at the exhibition just to ask about OpenACC. A guy there pointed me to PGI which was the one that work a lot with the compiler. It was great talking to the people there.

In the evening, I was so exhausted but still stuck with Dr. Box to a party, just to have a free dinner. The food was just to fill my stomach, the music there was too loud. If I remember correctly they came from our neighbor, Texas.

Dr. Box and I did not wait for the raffle. We know that we had never been lucky this way. We went back to the hotel around 8 something.

The next morning, after breakfast at the hotel, I packed and tried very hard to stuff everything I had got from the conference into the bag. It turned out that I had to enlarge it a little bit.

Dr. Box gave me a ride to the airport and now I am waiting for the flight home.

Seattle Day 5: Interesting Talk

I went to the keynote in the morning. The speaker was the CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA. The room was so packed that they had to split the other group to another room with video linked to that room. I was in that group. =(

After that I went to a paper session that was about GPU optimization. That was interesting. There was something that quite similar to my research.

I spent almost the whole afternoon talking to the people in the exhibition. Talking at NVIDIA booth was pretty interesting. They introduced me to the new standard called OpenACC which would change your serial code to parallel with just adding couple of lines.

I also got 6 more t-shirts. Just wonder how I can pack them into my bag.

Seattle Day 4: LittleFe Buildout

Nothing much in the morning. I just attended some sessions which are not so interesting.

In the afternoon, I had to team up with Dr. Bishop to assemble a LittleFe (a small cluster with 6 mother boards: 1 head node and 5 computing nodes, also had a GPU integrated on each board). Dr. Bishop was going to carry it back to Ruston. And hopefully, we can use it in our classes.

In the evening, the exhibition opened. I enjoyed hunting free stuff, got 3 t-shirts, pens, screw drivers, and some toys. I also won a car race at QLogic booth and got a box of car toys. I gave it to Dr. Bishop because he had a little boy.

Seattle Day 3: Gather up

Dr. Box, Aig, and Mon arrived at Seattle yesterday but we could just get together today.

I went to have lunch with Dr. Box. He introduced me to Dr. Hong Ong and his team from Malaysia. They also work on CUDA too, focusing on data transfer between GPU and CPU memory because the GPU memory is so small. I recalled that I had also come across this problem when I had been working on Haplotype Inference problem with BIOTEC.

In the evening I met Aig and Mon at the conference and went out to have dinner with Dr. Box at a Chinese restaurant in China town. I made me miss Chinese food back in Bangkok. ^^

Seattle Day 2: In the Conference

It was the first day of the supercomputing conference. After registration, I got a badge and a bag. I liked the bag. It was well designed for keeping a laptop, an iPad, etc. There was just one thing that I didn't like about it. It was a shoulder bag. Well, I preferred a backpack.

I also had a chance to meet many people from many fields because this event was not just for computer geeks. There were also physicists, biologists, mathematicians, etc, whoever that used huge computational systems to solve their problems. It was a good opportunity to make connections. ^^

Seattle Day 1: Just Landed

I left Ruston around 10:15 AM with Dr. Bishop. He drove.

After a long flight (around 6 hours with one stop at Houston airport), we landed around 6 PM. Then we tried to catch a free shuttle but no luck. So we took the light rail instead. Around an hour later, we arrived at Red Lion Hotel. I got into the room 710, dropped the bags and went back to meet Dr. Bishop at the lobby again. We walked to the opposite building just to have dinner. Once we got back to the hotel, we saw 4 police cars at the front door. No accident, nothing to give a clue what was going on. No one knew why they were there. So I just headed back to the room because I was so worn out.

A Little Bad Luck

On the evening I had a boring seminar class at GTM (Math building). This building is a little bit old. Though it had been renovated, the stairs were still slippery. I think it was also my fault that I did not step on the black strips which were to prevent slipping. I hurt my butt and my right elbow but still okay. And also thanks to my friends that were with me.


At least I could save my little laptop that I was holding in my hand. ^^