Noelle the Graduate
Today we celebrate Noelle’s graduation from Hudson Valley Community College. Congratulations, Noelle!
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Salt Lake City
RPI/CCNI booth at SC12
This year, the SC12 “Supercomputing” conference was held in Salt Lake City, Utah, and once again the CCNI had a booth at the conference. As usual, the conference was very interesting. We heard Michio Kaku’s vision of how pervasive computing could lead to a new boom in economic growth. We learned about the Blue Brain project, a proposal to simulate the human brain using supercomputers, based on fundamentals on how neurons operate rather than simply imitating the activity as is done with “artificial intelligence.” Many talks were about the convergence of cloud computing with supercomputing. Another theme was the need to co-design future computer architectures with programming models. This is because exascale computing will require vast amounts of electricity, unless our computer architectures change, particularly with respect to memory. As usual, the exhibit hall was amazing.
Sun rising in Salt Lake City
But also notable was Salt Lake City itself! It has snowed the day before I arrived. In every direction but west, mountains were visible. (The Great Salt Lake lay to the west. I saw it from the plane, but never from the ground.) There is a lot of construction going on, but also some pretty older architecture. Kitty corner from my hotel was city hall. Several mornings I was awed by the mountains, with the early morning sun shining on them.
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Hitting 200k miles
My little red 1994 Honda Accord wagon hit a milestone this morning: 200,000 miles! We captured the excitement while it happened.
200,000!
Just before 200k
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Hebrews 2 — Concerning Angels
Context and Introduction
We will be continuing our study with Hebrew 2.
Review
In Hebrews 1 we learned:
- Jesus is far superior to any angel.
- Indeed, Jesus is the Son of God, and Himself Divine.
- One of the author’s purposes was to refute the idea that Jesus was “merely” the Messiah.
In previous sermons on Hebrew 2, we learned:
- We should pay careful attention to the Gospel message and not “drift away”.
- Jesus is our perfect Savior, perfected by suffering.
Today’s sermon goals
We mean to try to “connect the dots” between chapters 1 and 2. Since the text speaks much of angels, we will also survey what the Bible teaches about angels – this is too important a topic to take for granted. Continue reading
This toy will be fun!
Blue Gene/Q
After years of hearing about how wonderful this will be, one now sits in the data center.
Data center leaks
Leaking data center
We had a problem in our data center: water, where it does not belong!
Our data storage systems had water coming out of them. Data isn’t wet; this was not a leak of private information, although it put data at risk in other ways.
The problem is that our roof is old, and it was raining. Not particularly hard; our data center remained dry after Tropical Storm Irene (which brought widespread flooding after >10 inches of rain in the area). But there is a seam in the roof just in behind these systems, and this was the time it started to leak. The water you see actually comes from the other side of the rack.
Of course we shut down our systems — electronic systems can often survive water as long as they don’t have electricity flowing through them while they are wet. We covered the areas where water seemed to be coming, and set up fans to help dry out wet electronics. The normal intense air flow from the air handlers also helped to dry the systems, as well as the wet areas forming under the floor.
By the next morning, everything had dried sufficiently to bring the systems back on-line. There were a few places where ceiling tiles had collapsed; these were soon repaired, and the data center once again in good condition. No data were lost!
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REACH puppet show at Troy’s Victorian Stroll
Jen Tyle reports on Christmas
Jen Tyle interviews a family about the meaning of Christmas
Learning the Christmas Story
The REACH Puppet Team
A young Victorian Stroller
Preparing for SC11
This week is SC11, the annual Supercomputing conference. For the second year in a row, CCNI has a booth at the conference.
It is rather amazing the transformations that take place on the exhibit hall. Taking our booth as a single example, compare what it looks like before we have set up, versus the completed presentation:
CCNI booth at SC11
CCNI booth at SC11, before we set up
Preparing computers for Hurricane Irene
Over the past week, we have been hearing about the horrible natural disaster headed our way called “Hurricane Irene”, preparing to hit New York City as a Category 2 or 3 major storm. Oh, scratch that, make it a Category 1. Wait, it hit today at 9:00AM as a Tropical Storm. Here in upstate New York, we never did expect much more than tropical storm winds, maybe with hurricane gusts. What no one warned us about was how the rain was we were getting would create catastrophic flooding! In any case, the plentiful rain and even gale force winds were likely to create power outages, or at least power blips. For the supercomputing center I work at, power blips can be the worst menace.