JeffJournal

I’m surprised to see that this is literally my first post in the “Open MPI” category. I guess I should post more here. :-)

Stolen directly from Brian’s blog:

“After 726 days and 8,187 commits, Open MPI v1.0 has left the building.”

Join the revolution!

Let’s cut to the chase: I am leaving IU and taking the position of “Chief Cat Herder of Cisco Open MPI Efforts” effective 13 March (2 weeks from now). Specifically, I will be responsible for all Open MPI development and coordination at Cisco.

Wwwoooooo hhhooooooo!!

The Open MPI project has been working hard to involve the entire HPC community — to include HPC vendors — in Open MPI over the last 2 years. Bringing Cisco into the group is an excellent technical and strategic move for the project. Since I have been working with the Open MPI core group since it was founded, I feel well-qualified to create a solid integration between the current core group and the vendors who are starting to come on board. It’ll take some work and discussion with all involved parties, but I think it will be fun, I think that the project will be better for it, and I think that the entire HPC community will benefit.

I’ve always known that I would someday leave academia and go to industry. I just never realized that it could happen so fast! Indeed, although I am tremendously excited about my new job at Cisco, I feel sadness and nostalgia at leaving Indiana University because it has been a really great place to work. Here is what I said in my letter of resignation:

It is with mixed feelings that I formally give two weeks notice of leaving my job at Indiana University.

I am excited because I am taking advantage of a great opportunity that was unexpectedly presented to me (I will be accepting a position at Cisco Systems to lead their Open MPI development efforts). I am saddened, however, because Indiana University has been a wonderful job and home to me for the past several years. I have learned so much working with the great people in the Pervasive Technology Labs, the University Information Technology Services, the Computer Science Department, the Open Systems Laboratory, and particularly with my boss, Andrew Lumsdaine, that I am at a loss for words to express my gratitude and thanks. I am truly humbled to have worked alongside people who genuinely cared about the technology, research, and human side of it all – everyone at IU made my job all that much more wonderful.

It has been a pleasure and an honor. A million thank you’s are not enough, so one will have to suffice: thank you for everything.

Open MPI has been formally joined by Voltaire, an Infiniband vendor. Woo hoo!

Sun has announced their intent to join (indeed, we’ve been talking with them for a few months now); we’re just awaiting the legal paperwork to make it all official (we’re extremely careful about intellectual property in this project).

All of Open MPI’s members are listed here. The great part is that each of the members have their own interests and goals and will actively be working on the Open MPI code base to expand it for what they want/need.

The party is getting larger!

…for the next 1.5 days. :-)

My time at Indiana University has come to a close; so sad. It was a great place to work. Ok, I already covered this part in a previous journal entry.

My [ex-]boss threw a going away party for me last night at the lavish IU Alumni Center. Just about everyone in the lab was able to attend; the food was great, Andy’s son’s jazz band played (and they were really good!), and everyone said nice things about me (at least when they were within earshot). Tracy and the munchkins drove up from Louisville to attend. The munchkins were up waaaay past their bedtimes, but did really well with the music (they kept signing “more” whenever the music stopped), all the unfamiliar people, and the late hour.

Andy gave a nice speech and gave me some lovely parting gifts:

• A truly hilarious Open MPI cowbell — references to the long-standing lab jokes about the famous Saturday Night Live skit and the Dirty Gringos “More Cowbell” song taken from the same skit
• An iPod Nano — completely unexpected and totally cool
• A PTL clock — probably pretty much standard fare, but it’s actually a pretty nice desk clock

I fumbled my way through a “thank you” speech; it didn’t come out nearly as eloquent as I had hoped. I did get to talk to most everyone, which was cool (while chasing the munchkins around, of course).

All in all, it was pretty great. Many thanks, IU!

• The world still loves analog watches. My old [digital] watch started inexpelicably turning on its backlight randomly (and frequently), therefore draining its battery. It’s solar-rechargable, and therefore easy to charge, but it would fully discharge about once a week (which a) requires several hours of direct, strong sunlight to recharge, and b) has never happened in the years that I have owned the watch). So it was time to replace it. I was looking for a self-time-setting digital watch (i.e., synch to the Ft. Collins radio time signal) with multiple timezone support (because I travel a lot). Not difficult requirements, I thought. But apparently only Caiso makes a whole line of radio-setting watches, and the majority of them are still analog. They have relatively few digital watches. Quite annoying. Why does our culture, who is so fascinated with all things tech, still want analog watches?
• Ah, the joys of parenthood.
  • Kaitlyn will not hesitate to rub her nose all over your shirt, especially when she needs to clear it.
  • Kathryn will eat anything (when she’s in the mood). Anything.
  • Kaitlyn’s new favorite phrase is “No want it!”. Frequently repeated many times at high volume.
  • The munchkins’ latest trick is to talk to each other in their cribs for at least an hour (or three) after we put them down at night. They’ll rattle on about the events of the day, do silly tricks to amuse themselves (throwing toys, bouncing in the crib, playing with blankets, etc.), etc.
• Open MPI v1.1 was released. Woo hoo!
• Per above, I finally got a new Casio watch. It’s nearly the same model as my old watch, but slightly slimmer and with easier-to-activate buttons.
• Sun is starting to heavily contribute to Open MPI. I think they’re going to be one of the best additions to the group yet.
• Environmentally friendly primary explosives. Wow.
• This morning, Outlook refused to send some outgoing mail. So I rebooted. All the pending mail then went out, but somehow I lost my desktop wallpaper. Sigh
• My requisition for a MacBook Pro was approved today. Woo hoo — back to the land of sanity! Update 10 July: it shipped!

Here’s a fun project to make a 4-node “Beowulf”-style machine in a small form factor named “Microwulf”. The part I like about it most, of course, is that it uses Open MPI

Woo hoo!

SC’07 was great fun. I got to talk to lots of people — some new, some old, and some whom I’ve “known” for quite a while through e-mail but have never met before. Those kinds of meetings are always fun — you get to [finally] put a face to a name.

As usual, I also gave about a billion presentations about Open MPI, open source, etc. Since I come from an academic background, I also find those to be quite fun. After one of the presentations, Rich Wellner from the GridGuru blog came up to me to chat about my talk. This talk in particular was about open source and the Open MPI project — why Cisco is participating, how the project works, etc. He invited me to send him the slides from the talk and a few paragraphs for those who didn’t attend.

It took me a few weeks, but I finally got the cycles to do a short writeup and send him the slides. Rich posted them here:

I notice that yesterday, Network World also picked up this entry:

I don’t know if that appeared in the print version or only the online version.