Phoenix

Summer full of enjoyment and a trip back to India. What more could one want??? Studies and Classes??? Its the same ol' routine again - class, home, cooking, projects, assignments! Well, hopefully this will be my last semester at Graduate School. Will "try" to enjoy my time! The palatial home at San Diego, the work at Qualcomm, the beautiful San Diego, my home in Bangalore, Mum's delicious dishes - I waved a bye bye to all that for the time being and am back to being a student at the hot-and-humid Raleigh. I'm eagerly waiting for winters. I hate summer in Raleigh. My trip to India was really good. Its always nice to see your near and dear ones :) Most of the time I was home, helping my family pack as they are moving to a different place. Met friends, family. Had a nice time. About the travel, I'd like to caution people traveling on Lufthansa. The journey wasn't particularly a pleasant one. Especially my last leg of journey Frankfurt to Bangalore. It was an...

Its been about 4 days since I'm back from my New York trip. Still gotta get out of the "vacation mood". But the sad part is that today is the last day of my vacations and classes begin from tomorrow; more accurately the "Spring 2009" semester beings at NC State University. This time I've enrolled for 4 courses which includes an MBA course. I'm either too brave or too foolish to do so. Time will tell :D This is the time when everyone starts applying for internships and so haf I. Nobody is hiring though, everybody is firing! :P Stuff in the US is just unpredictable. The stock market, the job scenario, the weather, the fuel prices.. just about everything! Analysts say the market will stabilize in an year. Its just wait and watch for everybody. The weather is kind of depressing and will be the same all through the month. Hafn't seen the sun since days. Its been raining continuously since the past few days. Get quite cold and may snow this month. The only...

A lot of you folks must haf heard about GPGPU (General-Purpose computation on GPUs). GPGPU is the term associated with using GPUs for general purpose computing. Today's CPUs are approaching the theoretical "speed" limit. A single core maxes out at about 3 Ghz. Going anything above does not give proportional performance gain. Its more of a liability since it involves more power, more components and hence costs more. Of corz, multi-cores is the solution which the industry has adopted; but then according to industry analysts, if there is no break-through in fundamental design of the processor then multi-cores will not scale beyond 8 cores. So, how do we satisfy all those number hungry programs like Folding@Home? Use the shamelessly powerful GPUs as co-processors to the present-day CPUs! This idea was explored way back in the '90s. The first public project was BrookGPU which exploited the GPU for general purpose computing. But since the guys who developed it were not the ...

With my mid-terms over, it was time for some outing. We hadn't been anywhere since our classes started. Class - Home - Lab and the cycle continued! Two cents of Hope (TCH) team decided to plan an outing to Asheville. Its like a "small" hill station, something like Ooty in India. About 30 of us in three 11 seater cars drove to Asheville on 18th October 2008. The Fall season is just beginning to show its colors. The leaves on the trees change from green to yellow then to red/pink color and finally fall off. This change is called 'Fall Colors'. This phenomenon has just begun and trees are half green, half yellow in Raleigh as of now. To see Fall colors in full glory Asheville was the perfect place and we hit the road. The temperature was close to 0C there. The trip was wonderful... a trip to remember. The photos can be seen in the right frame - Now Playing. PS: I know I need to update the MS in US and the Mac4Lin posts. I'll do it soon.

What does the PS3 mean to you? Just a gaming console? Think again! The power under the hood is immense. The PPU and the SPEs together make it a very powerful computing device. Stack up about 8 of them and voila! you get a supercomputer! Haf a look at this screenshot: (Thats our PS3 Cluster on which almost all the time I SSH to. Ah ha! Now I know where all the PS3s from our Library haf vanished! :P) One of our labs at NCSU runs a cluster of 8 PS3s. How powerful is it? Well.. quite powerful for hundreds of NCSU students to remotely login and complete their assignments and projects on it, simultaneously! The cluster is connected to the main University network and hence sharing is a piece of cake. Its faaaast.. responsive and absolutely apt in such a scenario. The cluster runs 64-bit Fedora Core 5 over a hypervisor layer custom-developed by Sony. Fedora was an obvious choice considering the fact that Red Hat's Head Office is inside our University Campus! :P [OK, I know NCSU gets RHEL a...

I had a wonderful birthday, yesterday; though I'd thought otherwise. We are a group of 11 and celebrate each other's birthday with much fanfare. However, things are different this year. Most of us are scattered all over the country. Everyone's busy with their jobs. I didn't how what to do, since only 3 of us remain in this city. But Raveesh and Bhavya surprised me with a Card, Gift and a Cake :) One of the first to wish me on my birthday was my sis. Wishes came pouring in from everywhere, relatives, friends, seniors, teachers, professors.. everyone! I'm so happy :)

Now that I am officially out of college, its a different life. I had been to college today for some work. That refreshed my memories, looking back at the dayz I spent there with my friends.... The classroom, the canteen, the gathering hot spots, the exam/internals study corners, the fest ads, the labs and so much more. I miss those golden dayz :(