Owls Count

The latest Top 500 list came out today. Our new machine is number 36. It is the largest UK academic machine and one of four systems in Berkshire in the top fifty. I’ll post some pictures of it when I manage to get them off my colleagues.

Today is my last day of conferencing for a while. For the last six weeks I have either been attending a conference, travelling to a conference, or organising a conference. Tomorrow is a rest day and then it is back to writing the thesis.

Yesterday I presented Sparse Hybrid Monte Carlo Methods for Matrix Inversion. The presentation went fairly well and I was asked some interesting questions prompting a good discussion. It would have been useful to have some graphs of the results, but the results were produced too late for this.

I am back from Bulgaria and trying to catch up with all that has been going on while I have been away. In Bulgaria I attended the 6th International Conference on “Large-Scale Scientific Computations”. The conference was in Sozopol, which is on the Black Sea coast - my room was onto the sea. Then we were in Sofia for a couple of days, which coincided with the US President being in town - meaning that there were police everywhere.

Now I am back I am busy putting together the final touches for The Sixth IMACS Seminar on Monte Carlo Methods (MCM2007). I must remember to write my presentation in the next few days!

For the past week I have been near Beijing, China. The primary purpose of the trip was to attend the International Conference on Computational Science 2007 (ICCS 2007). At the conference I presented, on behalf of Professor Ivan Dimov and Rayna Georgieva, Complexity of Monte Carlo Algorithms for a Class of Integral Equations. This is not in my direct area of research, but in a reasonably closely related area.

Also while out in China we visited the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall, some of the Ming Tombs, and some other areas in and around Beijing. The hotel we were staying at was a spa resort, so we were able to relax in the spa pools and get a massage. All in all a fairly good trip, even if the smog did get a bit much by the end.

Tomorrow I am off to Bulgaria!

This week is another where I am teaching. This time I am just teaching the practicals, so I am only busy in the afternoons and not all day as last time. Though, at the moment, I have not done that much. There are only two students for this module. On Monday the students were busy finishing off the coursework for another module and on Tuesday the lecturer decided to use the afternoon for extra lecture time.

Teaching again has reminded me that I am meant to be going through the lecture notes for this module and suggesting edits. Also I must have to write an exam for the earlier module. Tomorrow will be a good time for both of these, I feel.