Friday, September 5, 2008

Backx0r

As many of you know, I bike from this apartment to school. It's a fun ride that has just enough hills to make each commute a workout. Consequence: I get roughly two 15-minute periods of vigorous exercise every weekday whether I want it or not. With showers in the CRC and a change of clothes on hand, it's fairly convenient.

Several things that aren't, though, are the gates at this apartment complex. They are triggered by induction loops, coils of wire embedded in the pavement that detect vehicles by measuring the change in inductance of the loop when an electrical conductor passes near by. The rear gate is especially challenging since repaving has hidden the coils, and I believe it is not particularly sensitive.

However, a bit of online research and a brief experiment have changed all that. I can open it with impunity now. No need for bizarre aluminum blocks taped to my feet.

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School and research are going well. I'm involved with a new lab doing research into heterogeneous multicore systems. Additionally, I'm taking GPU VSIPL to dizzying new heights with support for matrices and various linear algebra solvers all getting more than 20x speedups from your trusty GPU. Additionally, in 20 short days, I'll be presenting an awards paper at HPEC 2008. This makes me nervous.

Coolest class ever: Dynamic Compilation. Our semester project will be CUDA=>IBM Cell/BE translator. Stop laughing.

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I'm taking some time to organize all the code I've written in the past that may be effectively reused. Stand by for libkerr and kerrutils.

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