Marenostrum, located in the Torre Giron Chapel is an impressive supercomputer. Rosa took us for a quick tour last week. The computer is built in a Church and it is a huge structure, with its own cooling system, and enclosed by glass.  Rosa explained to us that the city of Barcelona gave the church to the university and the department decided to build it in it after considering many other buildings. The computer was first assembled in Madrid and later brought and installed in Barcelona. The church is in a park a block away from Nexus II. Standing right in front of Marenostrum, I could not but think about how mankind has made technology quickly evolve in the past few years, it also gave me a glimpse of what the future holds.

 

 

I collaborated with Lester Melendez. He was working on a project with Hadoop and MapReduce and I helped him by creating a Java Class to compute the distance between two geographical points expressed in decimal coordinates.I learned some details of Hadoop and MapReduce which interested me on the technologies. 

 

Here is Lester at the Lab, he has been a great source of knowlegde and has provided a lot of help in my project. 

 

 

The small town of Figueras in Catalonia, near the border with France, is remarkable - it was the birthplace of Salvador Dali and it is here that Dalí created his biggest surrealist work, the Teatre Museu Gala Salvador Dalí.

 

 

 

Whether you are passionate about your surreal art or just have a passing interest in Dali, this is an essential day trip from Barcelona.

While here I also visited Sant Ferran castle. It is a real architectural jewel of the 18th century that is in perfectly
interpretable conditions. The frequent incursions by French troops in the second half of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th, revealed only too clearly the need, in this frontier territory, to have access to a military installation that could prevent the constant invasions from the neighbouring country. La Plaza was designed by the
Commandant-in-Chief of the Corps of Engineers, Don Juan Martín Zermeño, to provide accommodation for five infantry batallions and five cavalry squadrons, making a total of 6,000 men and 500 horses. The building of La Plaza began in 1753, and the construction work continued into the early 19th century. At the time it was considered
as a model of its kind, attracting notice for the vigour of its design and the magnificence of its conception. The 5 km. of moats, the 3.2 km. of perimeter wall, the 32.5 hectares of land occupied by the structure or the 9 million litres of water that can be stored inside its tanks are just some of the details that result in it being considered today as one of the biggest fortresses in the world, and the most important architectural monument in the Empurdà region.

 

Two weekends ago Eric Meyer and I visited the Roman city of Tarragona, Spain. We visited one of the pretttiest houses on Carrer de Cavallers is no. 14, Casa Catellernau. This 15th century mansion was the home of the powerful Castellernau family and apparently King Carlos 1 stayed there during his visit to Tarragona in 1542. There are other less savoury stories about the house involving screaming daughters imprisoned in locked rooms but these all add a littlel frisson of excitement and intrigue to the building. It is currently a museum with rooms decorated in 18th and 19th century decorative styles. It has a museum in the first floor.

We the strolled up to Tarragona's cathedral which is perched at the very top of the old quarter. From this height of about 67m, the city slopes down to the sea. Unlike many cathedrals it's not too overpowering and it's situation right on the street without any formal surrounds, is part of it's charm. Architecturally It's a mishmash of gothic and romanesque and is built on the site of an early Roman temple. We couldn't go inside because it was closed.

From there we went downt to the Roman Amphitheatre which was constructed during the end of the 1st century/beginning of the 2nd century outside the city walls, near the sea. The west side is against the rock where seats were carved out and on the east side seats were built over vaults. The amphitheatre was used for gladiator games, gladiator against gladiator or fights with animals. There were also executions here. Remains of two churches and a necropolis can be seen in the Amphitheatre. The churches, from the 6th- and 12th century were built over the place were the Christian bishop and two deacons, Augurius and Eulogius, were burnt alive in 259 AD.

 Finally, our last stop was the Roman circus which was built in the 1st century AD and it was 300 metres long. Here chariot races were held between different teams. The races could be dangerous and sometimes competitors died. Some of the vaults of the circus are well preserved and other parts of the structure have been incorporated in buildings constructed later.

 

I went on Friday to see Rosa and we printed a form required to gain access to Marenostrum. I took the form (where I entered my FIU email address) and left I it at the main office on the third floor. I am still waiting for an email with the approval. Marenostrum is an impressive machine. It has a peak performance of 94.21 Teraflops with its 10240 CPUs each running at 2.3 GHz. The size of the main Memory is 20 Terabytes and the combined storage available is 480 TB.

 

(Image taken from ww.BSC.es)

 

Access to Marenostrum is done through one of 12 available nodes. Those machines are frontends to compile the code which then will be run in super-computer. Allocation of resources is always done through a batch queue system. The GPFS (General Parallel File System) allows fast access to all blades of the cluster, allowing applications to access a set of files in parallel.

 

In order to run parallel applications, the files are uploaded and a parallel job is submitted. A typical parallel batch file looks like the following.

#!/bin/bash

# @ job_name = test_parallel

# @ initialdir = .

# @ output = mpi_%j.out

# @ error = mpi_%j.err

# @ total_tasks = 56

# @ wall_clock_limit = 00:02:00

srun ./parallel_binary

 

 

 

 

I requested access to MareNostrum. Hopefully by Monday I will be able to start coding the MPI part of the FFT algorithm based on the FFTW libraries. I spoke to Rosa and she mentioned the possibility to also implemented Grid-Superscalar to add yet another level of parallelism to the algorithm.

 

I will need to change the sequential algorithm into MPI calls. 

for(i=1; i<=2; i++)
        {
            //create file name
            char buffer[50];
            sprintf(buffer,"data/%d.bmp", i);
            load_image(buffer);
               fftw_image_load();
            tmp = time(NULL);
            fftw_image_process();
            sprintf(fileText,"%.0lf\n", difftime (time(NULL), tmp));
            fputs (fileText,f);
            output_fftw_output(i);
            unload_image();
        }//end for
    

 

While walking through UPC I saw some students doing a public experiment with a robot. I learned the nature of the experiment and volunteered to participate. The experiment consisted of a person walking towards another and stopping at what they felt is a comfortable distance from the other person, they had to repeat the same thing but with a robot this time. I participated along with other fellow students and took video of a another student doing the experiment and a picture of myself and the robot.

 

 

Yesterday I took some pictures of the lab in action.

 

Gabriel Lizarraga

Ramon Nou and Mario Macias 

 Gemma Reig and David Nadal

 

Ernest Artiaga and  Jacobo Giralt

top: Ernest Artiaga, Jacobo Giralt, Ramon Nou, Gemma Reig, Jorda Polo,David Nadal, Mario Macias
Bottom Gabriel Lizarraga, Lester Melendez

 

On the way back to Madrid I decided to take a short trip to "Monasterio El Escorial". This is a palace, monastery, museum and school, considered one of the modern wonders of the world. It is luxuriously enormous in size and was built by Felipe II to celebrate the battle of San Quentin on 1557. This is the burial place of many royal members and Spanish Kings and Queens.

 

The next day I woke up early and took the first bus to Toledo. This small town was the home for El Greco for many years. Here they have his famous painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. It is absolutely jaw dropping. I visited the many shops where they sold a variety of hand crafted knifes, swords, and all sorts of steel and gold works. Unfortunately many places where closed because it was Sunday and I could not visit a few key places. Nevertheless, I walked the entire town and spoke with a few locals about their customs and how they made the metal and crafted such beautiful jewelry. I had some lunch and returned to Madrid.

 

si