Life Update

First off to address the lack of blog posts: I have been a little stressed at work, and life has been busy outside of work. Both of these tend to dissuade me from any form of writing. But I am here now, so that is to say that work has gotten better, and life gave be a break.

Work is still going well, last week and the beginning of this week were spent on a problem that was proving to be difficult. It was an engineering problem that I was having a really hard time fixing. Today one of my displaced (they are remolding his office) coworkers helped me trace down the problem to memory that was not being free-ed up correctly. For those of you who remember Computer Science II and dynamic memory allocation, I created an array and forgot to delete said array when I was done. This lead to a different class, in a completely different part of code to start SegFaulting. As I had wrote this bad code a while ago, and it happened to work with the existing code, I didn't catch it, and did connect the two when I started building the existing code back from scratch. For those of you who have never programmed, this is the type of problem that you were always told about, your instructor made a huge fuss about it, but you never really listened because it was not all that obvious why you should care. Then, in your laziness (or forgetfulness) the problem does become something you should care about.

Long story short, problem fixed. And while I was ignoring that part of the problem, I created a nice benchmarking tool to use on our new K10 machine. I know I have not really talked that much about work, specifically about the GPUs I work with, but this machine is super powerful. In 2U space (or about 5 feet by 2 feet by 6 inches, or as Wes would think about it: 4 Medium Pizzas stacked in two stacks side by side) we have 8 GPUs to crunch on a theoretical 14 - 20 Trillion operations per second (so it is actually ~2 FLOPS per GPU). I am excited to see what we can do with this. Before this machine, we have been using single Tesla cards (older ~1TFlop GPUs) attached to our desktops.

In other news: This week I got to hang out with Penny! She was out here visiting her sister Meredith, and sacrificed a whole afternoon and evening to hang out with Gwyn and I. We met up at the Holocaust Museum, had some lunch with Meredith then walked over to the Constitution. Gwyn and Penny were not as impressed as myself and my parents when we went there, but it is ok... not everyone can love history as much as my parents. We headed in to Cambridge to JP Licks (Ice Cream!) and then headed home. I made Pierogies for dinner, it was the first time Penny had tasted them, she liked them! It was a great visit! It was fun to get to reminisce and catch up on life.

The Required Penny/Scott picture

 Monday Gwyn and I met up with the young adult group from Hancock (the church we have been going to). It was a fun evening getting to meet new people, but not nearly as awesome as our friends back in Pittsburgh.


Other events that are not going to get written about because they have taken place soooo long ago and have not been talked about yet:

Wes and Jamie lead an excursion to Rumney New Hampshire. The main goal of the trip was to get people climbing on the rocks, which was fun, but the hike and just hanging out in the woods was great. Unfortunately my transition from hanging on a rope to standing on my own feet did not go very well and I sprained my ankle pretty bad. Bad enough that the next day (a Monday) I had to call Gwyn on her cell phone (even though she was in her room) to ask if she would take care of her maimed boyfriend.

Kita's mom was visiting, and invited all of her friends (luckily myself and Gwyn) to come over and eat Indian Food. It was amazing. I have been a fan as of late, but I am hooked now. I wish I could go back and tell little Scott that he really should like all types of food.

A few of us went out to the Samuel Adams brewery in Jamaica Plain (a neighborhood a little south and west of Boston) . It was a lot of fun. Typical brew house tour: What is Beer? Here is where we make it. And Here is Beer (have some).