This is almost my last day of being in Brazil but it is really hard for me to leave here and come back to Miami. I learned a lot of things, made a lot of friends, and started interesting researches here. In last three weeks, I’ve edited one paper and finished the other one and also we start to work on the other topic on software engineering.  I’ve visited many places in Rio de Janeiro and enjoyed the food and coffee of Brazil. Brazilian people are so kind and friendly and you can start conversation with all Brazilians (if they know English). There are many places you can visit but you need to have friends here to learn how you can reach. I can say they have really good public transportation, and you can use boats, buses and subway to reach to everyplace, but the problem is the language and in most places it is only Portuguese which is a little bit annoying.

Beside the people and country, I really enjoyed working at the university, everything and everyone is friendly and also, you have free coffee. My advisor, Professor Clua and his students are really friendly and they invited me to many places. Last day, I and Professor Clua went to sailing and it was first time of me to be in the ocean, I really enjoyed the trip over the ocean and I am very thankful to him to help me to enjoy my time and doing strong research in Brazil.

I am pretty sure that I will return to Brazil to visit other places, I really enjoyed the trip and find many friends, but three weeks isn’t enough to visit everywhere and know the whole country.

 

Week 2 – Brazil

This week was amazing; I’ve just visited Christ the Redeemer and Sugar Loaf.  Christ status is on the top of the tallest mountain of Rio and it is possible to see the whole city from there. But Sugar Loaf is beautiful for another reason. It has a great view over a lake, ocean and the city and also it is a wonderful place for rock climbers. In this week I need to finish a paper before 15^th of this month, so I just attach some pictures from my trip to Rio. I will add more information by next week.

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I am pretty sure this trip will be one of the most important experiences of my life.  Brazil is really beautiful country with kind and friendly people and of course delicious foods.

After arriving to Niteroi, Professor Clua picked me up from Rio airport and he brought me to my current place in Niteroi. My place is quite close to the university (5 – 10 minutes’ walk). After that we went to the place near university for lunch and it was my first delicious meal in Brazil. They do have an amazing system for their restaurants, you must go there and pick a plate and put whatever you want in the plate (rice, meat, salad and …) then you should pay according to the weight of your food.

From the day after it, I just started my work in the university but in the weekend I go to Rio by using a boat which takes 20 – 30 minutes to reach Rio. And I don’t need to say Rio is one of the most beautiful places of the world with a lot of places for visiting including lot of catholic churches and beautiful beaches. For first week I’ve just visited some art museums and beaches which you can see some pictures from it.

The other important thing about Brazil is their people; they are really kind and friendly. I’ve got many friends in last week and they helped me a lot and have shown a lot of places to me.  

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Last week was like other weeks, I need to wrap up everything and finish my project here. So I spent a lot of time on lab and tried to install open virtual switch on ESX hypervisors. For this reason, I needed to install 2 hypervisors and make a physical connection among them, after that I used a windows machine to manage these hypervisors. After installing OS on VMs, I had difficulties to give internet access to these VMs but after several hours of working, I just used my laptop as a bridge and passed firewalls.

I was working really hard and I got tired. On Saturday, I just slept for 12 hours for recovery. 

What I really miss about Raleigh is the great nature of North Carolina. This place is best for camping and enjoys jungles.

 

In last week, I was working hard to make a final note on possible changes in VCL code to get a confirmation from people who are working on VCL at NCSU before leaving. So I spent like 10-12 hours per day on working, but the problem was the lack of coffee. I work at NCSU engineering building and unfortunately there is just one coffee store around this building which closes at 3 pm. So it was hard for me to work after 6 pm and I was so sleepy.

On Friday, I had a meeting with Doctor Vouk and Doctor Wright about my project and he told me to do some experiment on tunneling side and configure a network topology manually. So, last two days I was working on this side and tried to make a connection among these virtual machines. I hope to finish experiments by end of this week and start coding at first days of the next week.

The PIRE trip to Barcelona was very fulfilling both in a professional and personal way. I had a great time at Rosa's lab, and I think we accomplished a solid piece of work. We will continue to work together to shape the effort into a paper. And of course, I also had a great, great time at Barcelona. It is a great, very livable city that offers great tourism as well as nice places to revisit when you're there in a medium term stay as I was.

This will be my last post for now. I leave you all with a picture of Rosa's Research group, and as promised before, a picture of the Marenostrum computer!

 

From left to right: Xabriel J. Collazo-Mojica, Jorge Ejarque, Raül Sirvent, Enric Tejedor, Javier Álvarez, Rosa M. Badia, Roger Rafanell, and Francesc Lordan. 

 

 

That's were I run my WoW server. :) 

Time really flies during these internships. It feels like last week that I was sitting at home here in Miami. Then I started thinking about all the things that occurred during the time. The Miami Heat getting to the finals (yay). Loosing the Finals (boo). The Memorial Day and Independence Day celebrations in NYC. And several other things. The last few days were quite intense, preparing a 1 hour presentation and trying to come up with a plan for the coming months.

Initially, I was concerned as usual about our accomplishments. Then I started thinking about our accomplishments. We fixed some bugs, implemented some new algorithms, discovered some helped at times, wrote a paper, etc. Actually, being able to go through the paper section by section and getting feedback from my collaborators there was a great benefit. I consider their feedback very valuable given their industry prospective (and the number of best paper awards they have received.

Another thing I was able to take advantage of last week was a MATLAB workshop that was being held at Yorktown. All my programming work with these collaborators is done in MATLAB. Performance is the only drawback with this environment, and the workshop specifically focused on performance. As I found out, there is a code generator included with the new version of MATLAB that generates C code from MATLAB code. This should allow us to improve performance pretty easily. I was able to obtain a 30 day license thanks to one of the representatives there, so I will spend the next few days playing with that. I've already noticed that they've made the Mac interface better, at least compared to the 2009 version I'm currently running.

 All in all, it was a fruitful internship and I'm sure it will show in the quality of our outcomes in the coming months.

 

We just got a great opportunity to try and publish our early results on a Symposium. But the deadline is quickly approaching. Very quickly. So please excuse me while I go in hibernate mode. See you all after the deadline.

Last week we accomplished a milestone by submitting another paper. This time, to the Utility and Cloud Computing Conference. We were all at it until late at night. (See below for a picture of the Hawthorne parking lot at 1:30A.M.) We were pretty happy with the paper and it should be a good contribution for this conference, since there is a keynote on HPC in the cloud and the "diamond sponsor" is HPCWire. Now, I need to take advantage of physically being here by planning the next steps and discussing them with the group.

 

Hawthorne Parking lot afterhours 

 

Below are several photos from the IBM hikes that I went on while here, one of my favorite activities.

Last week week there was a department picnic, which was a nice networking opportunity. There were several activities, such as soccer, volleyball, badminton, and even a water baloon competition. The event took place at Croton Point Park, which is a really large county park with great views, as shown below.

Getting back to reality, this week was once again non-stop work on the paper. Its looking better and better, but there's still work to be done and the deadline is tomorrow night. We're currently working on compressing the paper down to 8 pages, which is pretty hard since we have so much data after working on this for several months. The focus of the paper is on the effects experienced when scheduling parallel jobs on virtualized resources, which we all think will be an interesting topic for the UCC conference.

 

Interesting wildlife

 

 

A nice place to sit back, relax, and...read your conference paper, of course