For those who are closely following my experiences here in Maine, I apologize for the delay in this post. Hopefully, after reading this, you will understand why I did not post the day immediately following the first.
June 1st - Orono, Maine.
Today is the first day of the program and we are to meet in the Barrows Auditorium at 9am. We were told yesterday that breakfast, lunch, and dinner will be provided and that it takes about 10-15min to get there. So after getting up, doing some push-ups, and a quick shower, I meet Brianna, Katherine, and Gerry in the common area downstairs. Thankfully, one of the DTD (Delta Tau Delta) brothers is headed in the general direction as us, and he agrees to walk with us for most of the way. We make it to the auditorium without a problem (save the rain), to find the other 6 participants. On the back table there is a huge array of food, including: croissants, Costco muffins, coffee, orange juice, and entirely more fruit than necessary. We eat breakfast and socialize for a while and then Yifeng (one of the two program directors) calls us over to sit and things begin. I can already tell that he will become a very familiar face this summer.
Yifeng goes through some of the more technical logistics of how things are going to work this summer. We also fill in and sign a bunch of forms to say that we will be employees of the University of Maine -most of the morning consisted of technicalities. I’ll save you the details.
Before you know it, lunch time has rolled around, but I am not entirely hungry because I had absolutely stuffed myself full of strawberries, grapes, cherries, and other fresh fruits I have lived without at DU for so long. Nonetheless, 12 boxes of pizza soon arrive, and I am destroying slice after slice. The pizza has a serious small-town taste to it, and I can’t seem to get enough. After we have eaten lunch and talked some more together, the faculty arrive.
This is where the REU program really starts to get interesting. 7 professors all from different departments gave power-point presentations on which project we would be able to choose from later. The first presentation is given by Bruce, the other program director. Bruce is a jolly, balding, old fellow, who has the personality of both a computer engineer and Santa Claus; trust me, this guy is awesome. Regardless, his presentation involved the visualization of data at high-resolution. Basically, he wants to build a screen as big as a projector screen using a grid of 16 monitors. Using monitors, instead of a projector, allows you to have good resolution from afar and close-up, in that you don’t have to zoom in on anything. Being a foot away from a 4x4 monitor-screen is just like being a foot away from any normal computer screen. The resolution possible on one of these screens in nuts. Example from google images.
The other 6 professors also gave presentations, Yifeng included, but also gave off more serious vibes. Prof Tom gave a presentation on magnets, and Andre talked about Bio Medicine. All of the presentations involved some sort of use of super-computers, in that they have ALOT of data that needs to be processed and the algorithms needed to process this data are not at all simple. The sort of processing power needed to handle the problems they presented could only be taken on by a super computer.
With regard to what they presented, it was all very technical. What I gathered is that the REU students will be writing code for a variety of professors of different fields (physics, bio med, marine science, climate change, etc…) who know their appropriate subjects very well, but are unable to write much code. So, basically, as an REU student this summer, I will be contributing to research that furthers the field of, say, physics. Some of the professors even mentioned that they plan to publish their research findings sometime during the summer at an international level. Yeah, I’m excited too.
After sitting still for several hours, I’m nearly ready to pass out. To find out why, read what happened in my last blog. Thankfully, I’m not entirely alone. Yifeng realizes that many of us are getting sleepy, as we’ve been in this room all day. We carpool are way out of Barrows and arrive across the river to where the supercomputer is located.
By the way, the University of Maine, is located in the small town of Orono in central eastern Maine. A beautiful river runs through the town, and right by the university. In fact, its about 40 yards behind my fraternity house. Follow the road on the right nearly all the way to the top of the photo, and I live just near the river.
The super computer is located in a community center that allows businesses to come in and use some office spaces, meeting rooms, and other generally boring things. So, inside this building, there is one entrance to the super computer that requires a magnetic key card for entry. There are 4 exits to the room, but none of them have handles on the doors back in.
To my surprise, I learn that most of the people who use this supercomputer have never seen it in person. In fact, not that many people, aside from maintenance, the creators of the computer, and REU fellows have even been this close to it. There are two main racks that contain all the different nodes, or mini-computers. All 128 of these nodes are connected by both fiber optic cables and ethernet cables at two of the biggest switches i’ve ever seen. In between these 2 racks of dual core mini-computers, each as fast as my laptop, is a central control station.
Interestingly, the super computer seen in these photos replaced this one. The computer you see here, is obviously, just a bunch of computers wired together to generate some beastly processing capabilities. It used to be in the top 500 super computers in the world at one point. Now, it’s a bit dated.
After touring the super computer building, we all headed out to dinner. Yifeng said dinner was payed for through the program, so I ordered a coke and a rib-eye steak. Dinner was a little awkward because none of us really knew each other yet, and well.. we’re all computer geeks. Nonetheless, we took a pretty good picture.
Finally, we all got back to our respective homes, a little exhausted from the long, yet amazing 1st day.
