The can opener wasn't working...

The can opener wasn't working, but the problem was solved.

Geeks being geeks

Matt finishes a long black, then finishes a Rubik's cube.

Papers and presentations from ICLP

Three new papers about parallelism in Mercury have been added to the papers page. Associated with each paper is a presentation that was given at ICLP 2011. The presentations are also available on the papers page.

I am the first author for two of these papers.  One of them has been published in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.

Intel blogs and whitepapers have good titles but basically no content.

For instance http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/finding-non-trivial-opportunities-for-parallelism-in-existing-serial-code-using-openmp/

This is titled "Finding Non-trivial Opportunities for Parallelism in Existing Serial Code using OpenMP" Sounds promising right? This is exactly the kind of work that I think is important (if I didn't I wouldn't be working on my thesis). However the article doesn't actually use OpenMP to find parallelism, only to exploit it. They use conventional profiling techniques to find places where parallelism might be useful but all the analysis must manually be done by the programmer. This analysis is: 1) finding the hotspots within the call graph 2) deciding if the hot spots can be parallelised 3) actually parallelising them.

The final step is done using OpenMP, so it's a parallelism annotation rather than re-writing the code completely, but this isn't new, we've seen OpenMP before. The rest of the article (like many of Intel's articles) is an advertisement for their software, in this case the different profilers that can be used. They also slip in references to other tools of theirs.

I'm probably not their intended audience, other people may be able to get more useful information from these articles such as "Use a profiler to work out where parallelism is likely to be a benefit" but that doesn't stop the article from being a giant advertisement which bothers me.

LGA socket insertion makes me nervous.

I must have faith that the pins are aligned. Fingers crossed!

ICLP DC Group Photo

Bullet bourbon

The glass is half full even when my trip is almost over.

A fountain without horses.

The weather is 32 and sticky, however I resisted the urge to play in the water.

Fountain in hotel lobby

This is horse capital of the world. You can't have a statue, painting
etc without something to do with horses.

Conference dinner

Determinicity analysis for prolog

The most algebra I've ever seen in one place.

New York

New York was great, even if I had terrible weather. By now you've
seen the pictures.

I visited part of New Jersey to meet up with a one of the founding
developers of Mercury. It was interesting hearing what he's doing
now, and to compare Mercury then and now.

I visited the site of the world trade centre disaster, I couldn't find
any monument, just a bunch of cranes not building the new WTC.

I took the subway uptown, a stark contrast from downtown. It's now
clear why films and TV show at least two different styles of
Manhattan, which is still just one of NYC's broughs.

I visited central park, despite the rain (or perhaps because of it)
the park was beautiful, much to my surprise, I thought that it was
simply a really big park. That's not to say it's not big, I probably
strolled about for an hour and saw less than a tenth of the park. It
seemed like every other person in it was lost; looking for their
friend, the exit and in one case the toilet.

I ate a very salty pizza for dinner, it was still very good. I learnt
that in the theatre district that the theatre owner (I forget his
name) collects a tax from restaurants and bars. I don't know if this
is official or if he strong-arms the restaurant into this position.

More central park

Central park

Stream in central park

Manhattan skyline in the background.

Ferry peer, Hoboken, New Jersey

In the middle distance is the Hudson river. In the background is Manhattan.

Times Square -NYC

Not as impressive as Nathan Rd Hong Kong.

Bye bye Cambridge

I'm on the train back to London and will fly to new York this evening.

Cambridge was awesome we had some good wether, the town is nice and
the people are friendly.

The ThreadScope implementor'z summit went well. We where able to make
many decisions about the future of ThreadScope and how it works for
GHC Mercury and Eden. Simon Marlow, Daniel and I are also planning to
do some work with dataflow graphs generated by either ThreadScope or
Mercury's auto parallelism tool.

I've still got some ThreadScope work to do before my WLPE talk next
week. Hopefully I can find enough time for this and wont have to give
up my exploring of New York.

Thr Wedding Cake

This building is in St James's college, I forget the real name but the
locals call it the wedding cake.

The river Cam

Buildings on Chesterton road Cambridge

Paddington station

They take trains seriously here.

London

I arrived in London yesterday after 24hours of flying and stopover. It
was long but okay. I walked through Kensington park and Hyde park to
Oxford St were I walked about aimlessly, had lunch and took the bus
back to the hotel - yes a red double decker one. Checked into the
hotel and had a shower.

I had dinner with Chris and Shanon. We ate pizza at a place a lot like
an old pizza hut, it wasn't great.

On day 2 I went to Cambridge, the trains are pretty good here. I
missed my first tube service to king cross but there was another one
in 2 minutes. Kings cross station is massive, and is actually two
stations, the main one and across the road is the tube station.
Someone told me that there's a third station attached too.

The service to Cambridge was good, there are 2 services an hour, the
same as city services in melbourne on a Saturday.

Cambridge is pretty, lots of old style buildings, I went for a walk
and found myself at St James's college, lots of old buildings and
quadrangles.

I had a good pub meal, people are very friendly, many people in the
pub say "hello" as you enter!

Terrible photo of a red double decker bus from the window of a black cab

1 down, 3 to go.

My ICLP slides are ready, but my MSR, WLPE and ICLP-DC slides are not.  I need to do some more implementation to get the remaining content for the MSR and WLPE ones.  The ICLP-DC ones will be easy enough to finish.

Tomorrow is packing and making sure I'm organized.  For instance I must make sure my laptop has the right files so I can work without an internet connection.

Lucas juiced all these oranges.

Is this thing on?

I'm trying out blogger, Hopefully it's easier than Drupal to maintain.

Mostly I want to be able to easily write about what I'm doing while I'm overseas.  But hopefully this blog is useful once my trip is over.