adam.oliner.net

As one of the more senior and more vocal interns at T.J. Watson, I was asked to be one of several students to help run a panel discussion. I was one of three students who sat up with the panel and asked questions of our respective panelists. I worked with Fran Allen, who was a pioneer in the field of compilers, and the first female IBM Fellow. She was an incredibly sweet and intelligent woman; it was a real pleasure to work with her. The panel was moderated by Bill Pulleyblank, who is heading the BlueGene Project, and is my boss’s boss’s boss. Also on the panel were Bob Dennard, inventor of the DRAM, and Bernie Meyerson, who worked with SiGe and scaling concerns. As if that wasn’t enough name-dropping for you, the session was attended not only by all the interns, but also by a number of IBM emeriti, and by Paul Horn, IBM’s Research VP.

After the session, I talked briefly with Benoit Mandelbrot, of fractal fame. As I asked him about his most recent work on finance, I became aware of a movie camera in the peripheral of my vision. As I attempted to ignore it, the fuzzy head of a microphone boom was lowered into the empty space above our heads. “I hate being videotaped while I’m eating,” Mandelbrot mumbled. This same camera crew later coerced me into chatting with Paul Horn, also on video. Turns out they’re filming some kind of recruiting movie. I gotta say: there was something completely surreal about that whole day.

Then, last weekend, I went down to Philly with Anna. We visited Colin and Heather first, and saw I, Robot, which I enjoyed a great deal. The next night we stayed at Ashley’s (right) with her bf Chris; dinner at Gullifty’s, drinks at her place. Sunday night was dinner with Alice and her dad in Chinatown in downtown Philly. Afterwards, I sat on her apartment floor and talked about intellectual property with her dad. It was great seeing everyone, and how much better their apartments are compared to mine. This is the fourth weekend in a row that I’ve been away from home: VT, VT, DC, Philly. This weekend, I plan to stay home. Or go to NYC. But that’s basically home, right?

I am going to end with an open letter:

Dear Person Who Dented My Car,

When you opened your car door, and heard that thud, did you stop to check if you had caused any damage? Did you stop and look at the pristine, scratch free car you had just defiled? Did you stop to consider whether the owner could afford to pay for the repair work? Did you search your morals, consult your ethics, to determine if you should take responsibility for what you had done?

I’m guessing that the answers are no, no, no, and no. I, therefore, consider your life to be forfeit. You are a stain on humanity, and if I ever learn your identity, I will wipe you out. I will break you, defile you, destroy you. And I won’t stop to wonder if you deserve to live. The answer is no.

Dreaming of Ten-Fold Retribution,

Adam

I’m back at work, stalking the halls of IBM Research with my coffee in-hand and iPod in-ears. For the next seven months, I’ll be researching various supercomputer-related topics, and hopefully working on some of the code that’ll actually make it into BlueGene/L. We’re hoping to churn out a few papers, but the only thing I really need to get done by the end of the year is my M.Eng. thesis. This general surplus of time is probably why I keep leaving near-psychotic comments on Colin’s blog. Aside from publications, I tend to gauge the success of my summers according to the quantity of free corporate-branded booty I manage to snag. Thus far, I’ve gotten a pen, a frisbee, and a folding chair with a little cooler pouch underneath; all in IBM blue with “IBM Research” emblazoned on them. I am a corporate whore. And how!

Last weekend was nice, because I went to Rob’s place in Greenwich, CT to visit him and Yong-Hwa. We went to a concert on the town green, next to the harbor. I listened to some symphony and some opera and played with some of the kids in our entourage. There was a moment, under the warm blue sky, when I realized that it was a gorgeous night, I was well-fed and unstressed, surrounded by friends and loving families, and listening to live music by the ocean. Alas, I couldn’t find the pause button in time…

I woke up at 3 AM on Sunday morning. I gave my alarm clock the finger, because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. But I dragged my ass out of bed anyway: I had to be at Columbia University in New York City by 8 AM. Why, in the name of all that is kind and decent, couldn’t they have built that damn school a little closer to Somers? Ivy league schools these days, I tell ya; no foresight. So, I hopped on a train and made my way south in time for JSSPP ‘04, a workshop on job scheduling that is run annually by, in part, my MIT thesis advisor, Larry Rudolph. My mentor, Ramendra Sahoo, and my manager, Jos

The site’s finally back up, and I’m just recently back from giving my paper talk at IPDPS 2004 in Santa Fe. The short version: woot. A longer version follows.

After a short stop in Albuquerque to get a good back-shavin’ (it cost way more than a nickel, and the first few people I asked seemed anything but “glad”), I arrived in Santa Fe. I stayed at the Eldorado Hotel, the largest hotel in Santa Fe. They upgraded me to a Junior Suite, which had two bathrooms, a fireplace, balcony, and plenty of other such silliness. It was nice. The first thing I noticed was how nice the people were: at the hotel, in the shops, at the restaurants… Granted, they all wanted my money, but a lot of places around Boston think that good service means fast service, not necessarily with a smile. Weather-wise: sunny and cool. An honest weatherman would have had a little picture of cash in the boxes for the days I was there, because the weather was money. OK, that was lame, shut up. There was an art gallery every twenty feet, with food being served just about everywhere else. Seems like a lot of people really did go to Santa Fe to start a restaurant. As I mentioned, there are pictures here.

The conference was fine, and I don’t have much to say about it except for the paper talk. I do feel obliged to point out how much fun it was to see the look on peoples’ faces when they would find out I was an undergraduate. I was definitely the youngest presenter. My talk was on Thursday morning, in front of about 20 people. I think I remembered just about every piece of advice anyone had ever told me about giving a talk, except for: 1) keep hands out of pockets and 2) slow down. I kept my hands in my pockets to stop myself from throwing them into the air, yelling, “Aaaaarrrrrrgh,” and running out of the room. The talking fast thing is just a function of my caffeine intake. There was infinite free coffee, and I tried to drink my registration fee’s worth. The questions people asked seemed to indicate a good understanding of our work, so I think it went well. The session chair tried to start some shit, but I laid the smack-down. No, I will not explain. Once I finished my talk, I fled the room to pack and checkout, a process for which I had only ten minutes.

After stealing all the toiletries and accoutrements the hotel hadn’t nailed down or threatened to charge me for, I hopped on a shuttle back to Albuquerque airport. During the flight over the Rockies, I watched the shadow of our plane ripple on rainbow-colored clouds while I thought to myself, “Fuck, I am so behind on work.” I didn’t get to eat any food during my layover in Denver (no time), and the only food on the plane was buy-on-board-cheese-suicide, so I just had a can of tomato juice. Plus, they showed the same movie on the way home as they had shown going to Denver: Paycheck. Friendly skies, my butt. My flight arrived in Boston with precisely enough time for me to just miss the T. I shared a cab with an MIT dude coming from Los Alamos who’s involved with some Top Secret Area 51 shit. (I’m 51 percent joking.)

Now I’m back, and I’ve only got two weeks before classes end. In that time, I need to complete four final projects, three short papers, and my thesis proposal. Oh, also: find housing for the next seven months, complete the IBM employment process, go to Senior Ball, present two of the projects, and, well, it goes on. Wish me luck, and I’ll just keep repeating to myself, “I graduate in a month, I graduate in a month…”

Earlier this week, I attended the ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) conference in Washington, DC. A paper I co-authored last summer, which you can find on my page of writings, was accepted as a full paper in the industrial/gov’t track. IBM agreed to send me down for the conference. This is my story.
:: Law and Order “DumDum” sound ::

Before we left Sunday morning, Ramendra and I rented a car. Sadly, it turned out to be a Crown Victoria, a.k.a a cop car. It drove like a boat, and frequently caused people in front of us to lay on their brakes. We stopped outside of Baltimore for lunch. This community was apparently composed entirely of badly-tanned, shirtless, fat people. They all drove red pickup trucks. I was grateful for the resaturant’s “no shirt, no shoes, no service” policy.

We stayed at the lovely Hilton in DC. I stole mucho shampoo. The conference consisted of guest speakers, workshops, tutorials, paper presentations, poster presentations, and a few meals. I asked Ramendra to do our paper presentation, since I had never been to a conference before and wanted to get a feel for it before I gave a talk. Incidentally, I’m fairly sure that I was the youngest person there (and certainly the youngest co-author).

On Monday evening, there was a dinner and reception. At the beginning of the conference, every person was given two red tickets, each of which was for a free drink. My mentor doesn’t drink, so he gave me his tickets. Later on, some random guy tossed an extra ticket on my table. In the end, I had a beer, brandy, martini, cosmopolitan, and a margarita. It was really funny discussing event-filtering methodology with a professor while thoroughly pissed. Ramendra insists I was coherent. I took pictures, and I’ll post them as soon as I get moved into my dorm.

Yesterday, I had an off-site meeting at a country club formerly owned by IBM. It’s now called the Casperkill Country Club, and is located near IBM Poughkeepsie and the East Fishkill plant (birthplace of the G5 (shut up, Colin)). I suppose IBMers get some kind of discount, but no one seemed to know. The place was very nice, and we lucked out on the weather, but I spent most of the day inside listening to technical talks and eating free hoity-toity food. Some of the talks kinda made me want to sneak out the back and play golf (which I don’t especially like, so that says something), but others were genuinely interesting.

Since high-performance computing is what I am doing this summer, I found this article on approaches to supercomputing to be somewhat interesting. It also gives a nod to Project BlueGene, so I felt obliged to supply the link.

Quote du jour:
Comment: “I can see the tustle between Microsoft and the South African slave traders [heating] up already…”
Response: “Yes, civil wars are always the bloodiest.”