Weekend with Saskia

I spent last weekend with my good old friend Saskia Triesscheijn (Zas-kia Tree-shine). We were neighbors in the graduate dorms at Virginia Tech last year, but after her graduation she went back to Germany and it was hard to keep in touch. She's a heptathlete (200m/800m run, 100m hurdles, shot put, javelin throw, high jump, and long jump) training for the Olympic games, and fortunately her sports club is only a few kilometers from Jülich! We visited Aachen for a day and took a look inside the Hohe Domkirche, a gorgeous old cathedral. They had several supposed holy relics on display there, including the diaper of Jesus (Holy crap! Sorry, had to say it...). The relics only come out every 7 years so we were lucky.

Sunday Saskia had a competition in high jump, shot put, and 1000m relay. Her goal was to improve her high jump so we were very excited when she scored a personal record of 1.80m! While she did the hard work, I was busy meeting cool people: Shiela (sprinter who was fluent in five languages and conversational in three more), and Eugene (decathlete who wasn't born; he was carved). It was a lingual adventure since you didn't know if the person you greeted to would answer in English, German, or Dutch.



In Aachen, I finally found a power adapter for my camera so I can get some pictures of Jülich!

Forschungszentrum Jülich

The research center at Jülich is really impressive. I'm working with Daniel Becker on time stamp syncronization for highly-scalable post-mortem performance analysis, and it looks to be exciting! They have two major computers here: an IBM p690 cluster with 1312 Power4+ CPUs and an IBM BlueGene/L 8192 PowerPC 440 CPUs. There's also a data center with three 670 TeraByte tape silos and tons of other goodies. There's a nuclear reactor somewhere on campus, but it's being decommissioned. There's also a particle accelerator and major medical research equipment.

The center is completely hidden deep in a forest near Jülich. I think it must have been a military institution when it was founded, because it's so hidden and there are military warehouses and old equipment scattered throughout the neighborhood. It's a really cool place to work.