Sass

In order to help organize my front-end design code, I've been learning SASS. SASS is a language that is a more structured and succinct version of CSS. SASS allows for things like variables, function, and inheritance, none of which are available in traditional CSS. SASS also removes things like curly braces from CSS, meaning that it is not backwards compatible. SCSS is a backwards compatible version of SASS, that personally seems more practical than SASS.

You gotta have a website

I've been working on making a website, mostly because it's fun. I've also been working on developing a tetris clone. Developing the correct handling and controls for the game is extremely difficult- there are a lot of high-level nuances to tetris that are hard to replicate using javascript. For example, the tetris guidelines specify very specific behaviors for rotations and wall kicks.

Temporal caching / temporal prefetching

Previously I had been researching the results of a temporal influence on caching. However, this wasn't productive because a lot of changes were being made to the code so I was almost always working with old code. Now, I'm researching temporal influences on prefetching, which means getting used to a new code and different coding style. I can't really go into any more detail, but you're welcome to read this article on the ISB if you want more details.

Switching simulators

I've had to switch simulators from an old competition simulator called CRC to a more updated and more formalized simulator called FSim. Also, the code for Hawkeye was changing a lot, so I am not working with the Irregular stream buffer, which means that I have also shifted focus from caching  to prefetching. This has required a lot of code migration and changing of job workflow. On the plus side, I can reorganize my simulation results, which is good since they were not very well organized.

Computer maintenance

One of the computers in the comp sci room broke, so we first cleaned out the liquid cooling system and replaced the cooling fluid. The computer still would not start, so we tried unplugging various parts and eventually decided that none of that worked, so we eventually decided to replace the thermal paste, after which it booted but with major data loss. We are still working on this.

Arch linux

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Arch linux, and I have to say that Arch is the largest waste of time I have ever invested in- but you should try it! It offers negligible performance gain and marginal control over basic system resources. If you switch to Arch linux today, you also have to set up your wifi via a clunky obtuse command line interface. There are many benefits, most notably that the package manager is called "pacman"! How cute is that?

I'm making a tetris

Making tetris is a standard beginners computer science exercise. Doing the basic layout for the game is pretty straightforward, but getting the game to handle well is another issue entirely. I've been playing a number of online tetris games as research, but many of them have serious control problems, e.g. no fast drop or awkward left/right shfting. This tetris clone looks very nice, (The DEMO screen in particular is reminiscent of old-school arcade games) but actually playing the game is awful! Here is the pen in its current state.

Computin

Last week we set up the other computer that was sitting in the teachers lounge. There was a lot of difficulty getting an install of any OS running (at first it wouldn't recognize bootable flashdrives etc.) but now we have a clean install of Arch Linux! Woo! We (me and ryan) also added RAM to the other computer and tried to add graphics cards/capability, but it caused strange screen issues. We also organized wires so it's not a jumbled mess and set up the new monitor for the "new" computer. That computer has a liquid cooling system which no one knows how it works, that somehow needs  to be refilled, so that might be part of what we're doing next week. It was pretty productive although unrelated to anything else. Hopefully I can get accustomed to Arch soon.

Results

In computer science, some data points can be very expensive to calculate, so compiling a sufficient array of data for analysis can take a very long time. In the past week I have been collecting many different kinds of data for this reason.

Mess up on Stampede

In bash, you can run commands in parallel by terminating them with an "&", rather than a ";". I thought that running commands in parallel on Stampede would help them finish quicker, since I had a job limit of one. However, by doing this I inadvertently submitted the parallel commands to my user nodes, rather than the job nodes, which is against Stampede user policy. So, after having my account terminated for improper conduct, I contacted TACC and they reactivated my account. Since, I've only had the chance to do basic simulations on the new system.

Move to different servers

I moved from Lonestar, an old TACC server cluster kept for posterity, to Stampede, the 7th most powerful computer in the world. The server comprises 6400 nodes, 102400 cpu cores, 205 TB total memory, 14 PB total and 1.6 PB local storage. Since, I've been migrating simulators and getting used to the new system of queueing jobs.