Starting to learn strace now

Questions I want to figure out:

1. Can we just trace certain functions? -- Yes
2. Why do people still spend a lot of time developing other tracing tools? -- For light weight
3. strace -o strace_output.txt -e trace=open,close , this allows you to track certain system calls

Jaguar the fastest computer in the world!

Jaguar is listed as the fastest computer in the world on November 16th, a day which is easy for me to remember since it is my first day of work :)

How do supercomputers really affect a person's daily life? Better weather forecast?

Old school blog, mini blog, photo blog, voting blog, OMG!

Now I am writing this "old school" blog on blogger.com. I also use twitter for mini blog, Flickr for photos, and facebook for some other interesting apps.

Should social network sites be unified? Technically, there might be some difficulties since they all have their strengths. But as a user, I would like a one-stop shopping place...

BYD and Google

BYD and Google, Chinese battery company and US Internet giant, anything worth comparing? I would say, they are alike "from inside the bone". They both did something counter-my-intuition. If you are in the IT industry you probably know some of these names: GFS (Google File System), MapReduce, BigTable, or in broader term, the Google Platform. The old me used to have the idea of "trusting the professionals". Why didn't Google buy expensive, neat-looking "professional" servers and software from IBM, which indicate "professional and high quality"? Why did all those in-house, "shanzhai" products turn out to be huge successes?

Recently when I read the stories of BYD, it took my surprise that it has some very similar strategies as Google. Instead of buying professional battery and car manufacturing equipments from Japanese giants, it made ALOT of in-house, semi-auto equipments. This is seen as a fundamental factor for the success of BYD.

While I still couldn't fully understand this, one of my thoughts is that technologies are not seperated from each other by very solid walls. Once you know the ABC, the rest is common wisdom (read my recent paper on prefetching, haha). So we shouldn't be too afraid of experts in other areas, you can be one too...

In the valley

On today's plane, an old lady told me about the history of the silicon valley. I'm wondering if the same thing will happen to RTP, hehe. Her son, who works at Cisco, has an opinion that security is a major issue for cloud computing, which I agree. However, the issue does not exist if we use cloud computing for scientific research, does it?

AWS and EC2

Today I registered an account for Amazon's web service (AWS). I spent some time reading about their EC2 service. It seems very powerful. How about starting up a company with a bunch of smart parallel-programming guys to provide service to other companies or government institutes? You know, not everyone affords to buy a RoadRunner, haha...

Also read this article about the hypothetical competitor for AWS. It would be cool if the companies can compete and offer free services :) I would love to try them out. I really hope the cloud computing market grow fast. Thank about it, petabytes of data flying around, awaiting my ideas to become faster~~~ Just a little day dreaming, hoho

Career path for OR students

Yesterday Dr. Agrawal from DASTURCO gave a talk about how OR students should select a career path. It seems business consulting leveraging OR background is an interesting choice. I should read more about it.

On starting my own Fedora project

Today Michael DeHaan from Red Hat gave a talk about starting projects in the Fedora open source community. Before I forget, these are two important links:

1. applying for accounts: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
2. Fedora planet (for discussion): http://planet.fedoraproject.org/

I'm thinking, why not import our speed-aware file system techniques into an open source product? One issue I need to think about is, while most other projects in the community is on the application level, our techniques are on done directly to the kernel...