adam.oliner.net

I am approximately midway through my notification deadline checklist, and with mostly good news. I have been accepted to the Ph.D. programs at Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon (CMU), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). MIT and Berkeley are both still thinking about it. Good for them. I’d hate for them to rush and do something foolish, like reject me. Once those have been nailed down, we’ll return to this topic.

Schools aside, there were also papers and fellowships. The Hertz Foundation has deemed me unfit to receive their money, which bothers me not-at-all. There are still the NSF, DOD, and DOE fellowships for which I am anxiously awaiting responses. For their part, UIUC has offered me a generous departmental fellowship package, in the hopes of wooing me to their fine school.

I’ve also been fortunate paper-wise. Although my initial submission to IPDPS 2005 was rejected, a subsequent submission to a workshop in that same conference was enthusiastically accepted, thus raising questions about the consistency of the reviews. Those aside, I will be presenting that paper in Denver this April. I’ve presented a paper at IPDPS before, so my giddiness is somewhat tempered. This is especially true in light of my other paper acceptance, at DSN 2005 in Yokohama, Japan. Not only does that paper mark my first co-authorship with an MIT professor (my advisor), it will also be my first time outside of North America.

Starting in a couple of weekends, I will begin the process of visiting schools. I’ll be flying to San Francisco to visit Stanford, Pittsburgh for CMU, and Chicago for UIUC. The Illinois visit overlaps with the start of IPDPS, so I will be flying directly from there to Denver to give my talk. Plus Japan in June, and maybe a family trip to San Diego in August. Frequent flyer miles will be pouring forcefully from every orifice. Don’t try to picture that, you’ll regret it.

In the mean time, I’m working in my office in CSAIL. Aside from revising papers and working on my thesis, I’m also involved with a class project (with Daniel and Erik) to make MIT an official supercomputer site. That means taking a collection of computing clusters and getting them to solve an enormous system of linear equations really, really fast. If we can run this benchmark and get an average of about one trillion floating point operations per second, we should make the Top500 List. Which would be pimp; it would mean I had put MIT on the list and helped put IBM at number one. Finally, my duties as a TA have earned me the nickname Adam the Merciless.

And that was the short version!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2005 at 5:54 pm and is filed under School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.