Phew it's been a busy week! Arrived in Wisconsin Sunday afternoon for my first week of training as a Cray engineer. I've worked in HPC for three years now, and I can honestly say that this is an entirely different level! There are a lot of things that we did similarly at Purdue, but there are a ton of differences simply in the way the parts of the machine interact.
There's also a huge difference in the amount of system knowledge you're required to have. At Purdue, we could get away with not knowing the little things about the system. Nodes booted just like a normal Linux box, and all was happy. We had storage admins to take care of our storage, and network engineers to deal with our network issues. Problems with the batch scheduler? You just IM one of our PBS admins. Everyone had their own little job (not to underestimate their abilities), and they stuck to it. When you weren't doing that job, you had side projects.
However, that was a site with 15 admins + people from other groups at your disposal. I'll be one of two engineers on site for my system. That's a big difference! There is no storage engineer there to configure your disks. You don't get a network engineer to figure out why something won't ping.
Don't get me wrong, there's still an entire engineering staff back at HQ at your disposal, it's just they aren't going to do it for you. You have to know the details about everything, or else you'll just spend the entire time on the phone asking how to turn the darn thing on!
Cray has enough people that come into town for their training classes and test phases that they have their own 3-bedroom apartment/condo available for some of the employees. This place is great! You don't have to deal with a hotel, or driving long distances - it's literally just around the corner from the office, close enough you could walk in about 20 minutes if the weather's nice.
The most stressful thing about this week though? Not being able to play. I miss my piano. I miss my sax. Jen Wiley posted another set of recordings from Tuesday night's Jazz Party at the Knickerbocker, and they sound amazing! I really wish I could've been there. Maybe I'll find some time Sunday when I'm home for a few hours that I can play before I head down to Mississippi. Until then, I'll just have to be content with listening.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Blogging again, attempt 2
So I started this blog a while back and didn't really keep up with posts at all. I never had downtime and couldn't think of anything to say. Don't bother looking for the old posts. I deleted them.
That was all before I decided to leave my quiet little life at Purdue and go work for Cray, Inc. If you aren't familiar with Cray, they built the (currently) #1 and #4 supercomputers in the world. Kind of a big company, and an excellent place for me to start my post-collegiate career. Unfortunately this also means moving away from my hometown and starting someplace new, but I'm up for the challenge!
The hardest part about moving away is leaving all of the amazing people I've met over the years. I'll be close enough to home that I can visit from time to time, but since I'll be on-call every other week, I can't visit all the time. This also means I have to leave behind some of the bands that I've played with for many years now, including The Big Swing Band. I've also been playing at the Tuesday night jazz party that Brent Laidler helps put on at the Knickerbocker saloon every week this summer. I'm pretty bummed about this, since I haven't played combo sets in quite a while. You should check out Jen Wiley's blog to hear recordings from this week's session. It's quite a group of musicians that turn out each week, and it's more than doubled in size since I first showed up only a month ago! Hopefully I can find some cool people to play with in Dayton, but we'll see.
It's going to be a busy few months ahead... I leave for Wisconsin on Sunday morning, fly back to Indy next Friday the 23rd, go to Dayton on the 24th to look at apartments, back to Lafayette that evening, and eventually down to Mississippi for more training. I'll try to post updates when they're available. Until then, a big hello to anyone who reads this. Hope I can keep it interesting enough for ya!
That was all before I decided to leave my quiet little life at Purdue and go work for Cray, Inc. If you aren't familiar with Cray, they built the (currently) #1 and #4 supercomputers in the world. Kind of a big company, and an excellent place for me to start my post-collegiate career. Unfortunately this also means moving away from my hometown and starting someplace new, but I'm up for the challenge!
The hardest part about moving away is leaving all of the amazing people I've met over the years. I'll be close enough to home that I can visit from time to time, but since I'll be on-call every other week, I can't visit all the time. This also means I have to leave behind some of the bands that I've played with for many years now, including The Big Swing Band. I've also been playing at the Tuesday night jazz party that Brent Laidler helps put on at the Knickerbocker saloon every week this summer. I'm pretty bummed about this, since I haven't played combo sets in quite a while. You should check out Jen Wiley's blog to hear recordings from this week's session. It's quite a group of musicians that turn out each week, and it's more than doubled in size since I first showed up only a month ago! Hopefully I can find some cool people to play with in Dayton, but we'll see.
It's going to be a busy few months ahead... I leave for Wisconsin on Sunday morning, fly back to Indy next Friday the 23rd, go to Dayton on the 24th to look at apartments, back to Lafayette that evening, and eventually down to Mississippi for more training. I'll try to post updates when they're available. Until then, a big hello to anyone who reads this. Hope I can keep it interesting enough for ya!
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