sleepy

Who would have thought that

One can survive on just ten

Hours of sleep a week?

Well, I wouldn't've.  But it turns out that, not only is it possible, it's a helluva lot of fun!  The Cluster Challenge this year has been a really different experience from last year, but these German fellows are a (metric) shitton of fun.  :)  We've spent a lot of time with the cluster, but it's also been a good time to, like, learn about other cultures, yadda, yadda.  But, seriously, it's been interesting.  They've not missed a chance to make fun of me for the US university system; I'm missing a test and a couple homeworks this week, and my professors requested that I do them and fax them, which is apparently completely a completely unreasonable idea in their system.  I guess I thought it was sort of unreasonable, too.  Grr.  Anyway, we have been having a great time.  The organizers set us up with a trip to the Main Event, which is a place near Austin with laser tag, rock wall climbing, bowling, an arcade, pool tables, ...

The challenge itself went well.  We ran more (I think?) data sets than any other team, and we didn't run into any issues.  The MIT team didn't show up, and the StonyBrook team from last year essentially bailed them out, with help from Dell.  The MIT rack didn't show up; they thought that they were going to run a rack with GPUs in it, but there was no chance that they'd finish in time to present it here.  So the SB kids who were supposed to just be volunteers asked Dell for a rack and some nodes since they got here.  They scored an impressive... 16 GFLOPs on Linpack.  Ouch.  Arizona is running a Windows cluster, which is an interesting crippling in itself.  The Colorado team was running some hardware that was scheduled to be announced, but it didn't wind up happening, so they had to rebuild their cluster the morning the competition started lest they violate their NDAs.  Awful.  But the other teams (Purdue, Alberta, and Taiwan) seemed to do alright.

There's about a thousand other things that I could say, but I have to go and not sleep some more.  :)

seattle

A city of grey,

And cities of hot and cold,

Too many plane trips.

Seattle was fun. It was good to go back there; I remember when I was 12 or so I decided that that was where I wanted to live the rest of my life. So when Microsoft offered me a chance to interview, I jumped at it. There are pictures to be seen in my picasa album. The interview? Well, it was not quite as easy as the phone interview, but I wasn't impressed with its difficulty, either. A couple sample questions:

What's the best way to do a level-order traversal of a tree in which each node has arbitrary numbers of children, and there is an 80% chance that there will only be two levels?

What's the best way to find the previous node in an in-order traversal of a binary tree?

What's the fastest way to find the nearest common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree?

Design Expedia. (This question was unfortunate; I'm an Orbitz girl.)

If you have two sorted linked lists, what's the fastest way to merge them into one sorted list? How much extra space do you need to maintain pointers for this algorithm?

It was sort of like I was back in C343. I even got asked runtimes for all the algorithms I designed. Woot. Anyway, the moral of the story is that I felt like I totally nailed the interview. I'll know for sure later this week. I really hope that things happen such that I get the position in the Dublin dev office... but we'll see. ;)

I guess I still have to comment on the election, too! I'm really excited that Indiana went blue. AFAIK, it's the first time since LBJ that we've voted Democrat. I'm proud of you, Indiana! I'm also proud and not proud of California; they passed one bill that requires the humane treatment of all animals raised on farms within that state (i.e. Valkyrie could eat any meat that comes from California!), but they also voted yes to Prop 8? That's disappointing. I don't understand why homophobia is so rampant.

I got my new glasses yesterday, which is exciting. They're exactly the same as my old glasses... but not lost. Haha. And now they come with the added amusement that they're vaguely like Sarah Palin glasses. :)

I can't wait to leave on Saturday. My two-week adventure promises to be epic. I wound up buying a plane ticket to Toronto; since Mom offered to pay half of it (she's terrified that I would crash into a snowbank and die and then my corpse would be raped by wolves, then be stolen by Canadian lumberjacks and boiled down into syrup) it's actually cheaper than driving. Which is awesome because it saves ridiculous amounts of time (2 hours in a plane is way better than 20 hours in a car, imho).

Oh! The guys for the Cluster Challenge team from Germany--well, two of them--, are in town now. I met them yesterday finally. I think that this year is going to be lots of fun at SC! How could it not be? I mean, c'mon. It's frickin Austin.

Anyway, I think that's about all I have for the moment. Maybe I'll get better about blogging regularly sometime...

change

Change marks all of us,
Some far more notably so,
Others seem inert.

I went to a breakfast this morning with WIC (Women in Computing), and was then whisked away to a little seminary thingy held for the direct admit kids to CS and Informatics. It was pretty interesting. I guess I have a little bit of a different perspective on things after spending the summer in Cali, but once I got back into talking with Suzanne and Laura it felt like I hadn't left. I'm super excited about a few things now:

1) Being a UI for the Goofy Giggles class! I talked to Prof. Brown today about it briefly, and he seems excited to have me. Working for him last summer was great, so I'm assuming that this experience will be as good.

2) The Cluster Challenge in Austin! Laura informed me that it is, indeed, going to happen, and that I'm welcome to participate. Should be a lot of fun. Except it's getting restructured this year, I guess. I liked the format last year (learning all the random interesting things about supercomputing was great), but I guess this year we're in it to win it. Hmm.

3) Tae Kwon Do! I just changed my schedule so that I'm in Tae Kwon Do instead of Yoga. I feel like it will better suit my tastes, perhaps.

4) The Putnam! It's been a long time since I've done real, interesting math. I noticed this when I was going through the book Evan got me for my birthday (A Mathematical Mosaic, Ravi Vakil). I hope that I do better than average, but average on this exam is a 0, and I'm pretty sure I can get at least a point someplace. We shall see!

5) Parkour/getting back into shape! Jeff said that he'd be interested in trying out parkour-y things with me. Plus I need to lose all this fat that I got from the friggin amazing food at Google. Which shouldn't be hard since I'm living on a student budget now!

6) Cooking! I realize that this is in direct conflict with my last item, but I don't care! I just got a new set of pots and pans from Gram & Gramps, and I can't wait to use them for the first time. Hopefully this weekend!

Anyway, back to productivity (or some rendition thereof). I have to finish some stuff up before I go laking this afternoon. ;)