Ganesh Swami

I just came back from an awesome 10-day trip to China. We visited 5 cities: Shangai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Xi’an and Beijing. We drove to Suzhou and Hangzhou from Shangai, flew to Xi’an from Hangzhou and took the overnight train to Beijing from Xi’an.

Only a part-time job

The highlight of the trip was The Great Wall. I was completely blown away — it was nothing like I expected!

The Great Wall

The experiences are far too many for me to write about, so I’ll let you see my photos instead.

Here’s my summary of the hot chips workshop that I recently attended. It was well attended with over 600 people showing up. The organizers also provided lunch on all days and dinner on one day. I learnt a lot, not only from the tutorials and talks, but also from talking to people during lunch and dinner.

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I came across a pure Tamil URL today: http://உதாரணம்.பரிட்சை/முதற்_பக்கம். Searching for such website is hard if ones doesn’t know how to type these.

In other news, lack of WiFi at my hotel encouraged me to walk around downtown SF. I should have gone earlier and rented a bike (shop closes at 6pm.)

I’ll be at Stanford for the next few days for Hot Chips 20, a symposium on high performance chips. Sessions I’m particularly interested in:

• D.E. Shaw’s specialized ASIC for molecular dynamics which I’ve written about earlier and IBM’s PowerXCell powering Roadrunner.
• Upcoming architectures: AMD’s 780G and Intel’s Nehalem (dot products of special interest to me.)
• Chips tuned for network or IO (Sun’s Rock, Fujitsu’s SPARC64VII and Intel’s Tukwila.)
• Algorithmic content: Roofline models for automatic tuning of kernels (good addition to Demmel’s talk on the future of linear algebra from MMDS.)
• Intel’s Larrabee: response to “the can of whoop-ass” (detailed architectural paper from SIGRAPH.)
• CUDA: useful for a class of algorithms (based on memory access.)

I’m going to be trying something new this time — live blogging. I’ll try to push constant updates to my twitter stream : gane5h.

I’ll be staying at the Sheraton in Palo Alto. Drop me a line if you want to meetup for a chat.

I’m now a proud owner of an Apple iPhone 3G. There are tons of reviews out there that you can lookup, but here’s mine with the purpose of getting-shit-done:

Pros:

• The easiest phone on the planet. This has got to be one of the most usable devices I’ve ever used. Everything from looking up contacts, syncing, WiFi is so easy.
• Native syncing with Exchange. Hate duplicate copies of my contacts.
• Inbuilt music player.
• Seamless integration with my Mac.
• Volume controls as physical buttons on the outside unlike the iPod Touch.

Cons:

• The touch screen is “cool” for a few minutes but not usable. I regularly lookup information on my phone while driving — this practice will now have to stop.
• Web browsing on the phone isn’t even marginally useful for me.
• GPS isn’t very good. That’s OK because I got a real GPS unit.
• 50% battery charge in two days. Wow. In a year, I’ll need to keep the phone plugged in at all times.
• Sluggish. Skips music when syncing contacts.
• The alarm module is less useful than my 4 year Nokia phone.