As you can see from the other blogs in the group, we have been working on our projects and have been going to wonderous places of Brasil.  What is missing is how to survive in Brasil.  So I am dedicating this entry to the Rio de Janiero Niteroi Brasil Survival Guide.

STEP 1 What to bring:

There are many things I wish I had and there are things that I brought that are essential. In the following paragraphs will be a list of items that you should definately pack.

The first thing you should bring especially visiting Brasil in July is a hoody and a light jacket.  Remember that Brasil is in the Southern Hemisphere.  This means that the seasons are opposite and the water really does flow in the opposite direction. So this is a definite item that will be needed.  It is always good to bring it to handle the gentile breeze.

A good flashlight is definately needed.  It gets dark around 5-6PM which leaves a lot of activities done at night, due to the danger that often comes with Brasil, a good flashlight will help you in many ways.  The traffic is also pretty crazy around here and this will help keep you safe.

 I really wish I remembered to pack speakers.  How can you have a proper dance-off with your fellow PIRE researchers if you dont have a kicking sound system to get everything moving.  Luckily another PIRE researcher remembered this golden piece of electronics.

Wireless router for the broadband internet is definately needed to share connectivity with many devices. Especially if you live with others.  Make sure it can do 802.11g or better.  I would suggest doing WPA encryption with MAC address filtering.  There are tons of AP's that are running WEP that were easily cracked.  This allowed us to gain access temporarily but not to any bandwidth that was usable.

I cannot stress the importance of bringing your own towels.  Bring more than one too.  They go fast and the more you have the longer you can survive between laundry.  Make sure you have several sizes too. Make sure you also have a beach towel, even though it is winter here, the beach is still alive and a great place to go.

 The phones here all run off of simm chips.  If you have the ability to unlock a phone that takes a simm chip then you are all set, sort of.  Due to criminals usage of prepaid phones, they must register any and all simm chips with a real live breathing Brasilian, so you need to convince a Brasilian to let you use his ID to purchase a phone chip.  The prepaid cell phone simms are the best route, but there are drawbacks.   The phone company works in different ways, any incoming call is free for you.  Unfortunately any call you make, you pay for which happens to be REALLY EXPENSIVE.  In the USA we talk until we practically see each other, down here in Brasil you see the briefest phone conversations on the planet.

The importance of a good bank account is another thing that you cannot leave Miami with.  We all went to Citibank and opened an account that will not charge extra fees when we widthdrawl money from our accounts.  Bank of America was charging $4 for every transaction and 6% of any widthdrawls.  Exchanging money at the airport wasnt much help either.  The best solution we did was to open up the accounts with Citibank.  I am not trying to endorse Citibank here so go to several banks and talk to them about your situation and see what they can offer you.

OK GO NOW AND CREATE A SKYPE ACCOUNT!!! OK now pay for a Skype-Out number.  We have all been using my Skype-Out number and my portable wifi Skype phone.  Give us a call at 313-769-2900.  This service only costs $7-$10 a month and gives you unlimmited calling in the USA.  HOW CAN YOU BEAT THAT.  You know what? I am going to call mom and dad now.

Happy fourth of July everyone! I'll miss the fireworks this year, although from the Miami weather report it looks like they'll be rained on anyway. I'll just delay my fireworks extraveganza until the 14th - Bastille day in France.

This week was a calm week - not a lot of touring around, revisited some places thast weekend and posted new pictures, plan on watching the Fira Montjuic again tonight - just have to get there early, there is a fashion show going on, and a fair bit of the street and area around the fountain is gated off.

Gabriel discovered a new market near us (well about 6 or more blocks, but closer than the Boqueria) that I plan to go to tonight before the fountain. Supposed to be nice and cheap.

Report

Accomplishments

Judit gave me a couple of hours of training in Paraver - quite the complex tool set. Spending some quality time with a small trace of WRF I have from the tutorial. Still waiting for Access to learn how to run my own traces.

Installed WRF on the VM that I built - that was a pain. Turns out if you are installing WRF in Ubuntu linux you need a scripting utility called m4 installed - or the whole thing bombs. It will give you file not found errors - and in the compile logs does not relly give you an error about that not being present. It is actually buried in the log file! what a pain. That took a couple of days to track down - I thought I was missing a file. I can now compile and run WRF and have run the first real test in the test suite. 

AFter that I installed WPS - another useful WRF tool, that went well.

Sadly the visualization tools, while free, require signing up to get a login - I'm not sure why- but without the free sign up, and the admins approval of your login, you can't the tools. A tad bit paranoid I'd say. So now I wait to try the visualization end of things. Also looking at the output format from wrf as a side adventure.

Downloaded the WRF Portal program from wrfportal.org, so far so good - at least it installed clean (after installing ant) and seems to be working, I need to do more configuration though.

Plans

Grid School next week at Sofia Antipolis. Turns out the tour d'France is going through there the day I arrive - I expect a it of chaos. We even have word the airport is expecting to have significant delays - fortunately after I get there (I hope). 

So the plans can be summed as learn grid tools, enjoy Nice and the surrounding area.

Summaries/Critiques

Cloud Computing and Grid Computing 360-Degree Compared by  
Ian Foster, Yong Zhao, Ioan Raicu, Shiyong Lu

I found the paper to be a well written overview of both grid and cloud and a reasonable comparison between them. He identified the strengths of each and the weaknesses too. Some of the observations he made on the uses of clouds vs grids were accurate from a business point of view, although I think that he assumed equal access to both a grid and a "cloud grid" in his comparisons. For those without access to a grid HPC on a cloud grid may be acceptable. I did rather like his observation on the future of the desktop cpu, where will computing be when you have 1000 cores on a chip and a 8 cpu system - what then for the grid and cloud? He did point out that the grid is a much more mature organization with the appropriate tools and more. From a business point of view at what point do you release control completely to an external agency? He hinted at some of the data tracking and provenance issues - with new US rules on controls, clouds just aren't able to meet those requirements.
 
All in all a great overview paper (and quite the reference paper list to read)

Ontological Directory and Directory Load-Balancing for Large-Scale Grids

Juan Li

This paper is a reasonable discussion of overlay networks and the problems involved in resource discovery and routing.

Starting the 4th week here in Brazil, Prof. Esteban Clua took us to Cristo Redentor, a.k.a Super-Jesus. Christ the Redeemer is a statue of Jesus Christ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The statue stands 30 metres (98 ft) wide and 38 metres (120 ft) tall with its pedestal. It weighs 635 tons (700 short tons), and is located at the peak of the 700 metres (2,300 ft) Corcovado mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro. It is one of the tallest of its kind in the world. A symbol of Christianity, the statue has become an icon of Rio and Brazil. The statue of Christ the Redeemer is a very important symbol of Brazil's Christianity. It is made of reinforced concrete and soapstone.

Brief History:

The idea for erecting a large statue atop Corcovado was first suggested in the mid 1850s, when Catholic priest Pedro Maria Boss requested financing from Princess Isabel to build a large religious monument. Princess Isabel did not think much of the idea and it was completely dismissed in 1889, when Brazil became a Republic, with laws mandating the separation of church and state. The second proposal for a large landmark statue on the mountain was made in 1921 by the Catholic Circle of Rio. The group organized an event called Semana do Monumento ("Monument Week") to attract donations and collect signatures to support the building of the statue. The donations came mostly from Brazilian Catholics. The designs considered for the "Statue of the Christ" included a representation of the Christian cross; The statue of Christ the Redeemer with open arms was chosen.

A personal thought is that the statue is just breathtaking and the view is spectacular. It really was a great experience and I would like to thank Dr. Clua one more time for taking us around Rio and all its wonderful places. Here are some pictures from the trip to Cristo Redentor:

 

After that, on Monday I started finalizing my project, which was due on Tuesday. After this we had a conference call with our project manager (Chad Gniffke), he will be reviewing our project and giving us feedback on Monday, which we’ll kick off with the next phase. The following contents were covered and completed:

    * Competitors Overview
    * Product Offering
    * Internationally Available and Where
    * Support Process
    * Social Community Offering
    * Sales and Distribution Method
    * Pricing
    * Messaging & Marketing
    * Value Proposition
    * Technology
          o Their own
          o Third-Party including open source
    * Deployment
    * Feature Set Overview
    * User Interface Consistency
    * Unique Features
    * Strengths
    * Weaknesses
    * Automation Capabilities
    * Virtualized Network Wants and Needs
    * Integration with Other Products
    * Service Offering
          o Education
          o Consulting
          o IT Services
    * Media (Competitor Videos)

Sunday June 28, 2009 the day started with the visit to Cristo Redentor (one of the seven wonders of the world). Dr. Esteban and Mark (Phd Student) picked us up at 9 am and we started our journey. After arriving at the location we took a Van up to the location where we had to go up the stairs upto the monument. The location and view was breath taking the weather was partialy cloudy and blocked some of the view of the city but the monument and the atmosphere was amazing the words cannot describe it. Many visitors were taking pictures and it felt a little crowded but i found some beautiful locations to get some awesome pictures. Next week Dr. Esteban have scheduled a  visit to  Petrobras(oil company). We will visit  thier research and IT lab where some of the UFF students are conducting research. I am really lookng forward to this and i hope it goes will.

On Sunday we the entire group went to Corvocado (a.k.a Cristo Redentor), Esteban and one of his Ph.D students, Mark was our tour guide. We jumped in the car and drove for a good 30 minutes, then we finally arrived at the mountain in which we had to go up by car. The mountain road wasn't as steep as I thought it would be, but it did take a good 15 minutes to get to our destination. Near the top of the mountain is a cut off point in which you have to park you car, the parking lot was very small, a capacity of 25 cars, max. At that point, the small bus will take you to the top, where the statue is. I've seen a lot of amazing things in my life, but those experiences don't even come close when I visited Corvocado. The view from the top was amazing, the East of the statue was very cloudy, but to the North, South and West, you can see all of Rio de Janeiro. In side the base of a the statue is a small chapel were a pastor was doing a sermon. For about an hour all we did was take pictures, then we decided to leave to go to Parque Lage.

 Cristo Redentor

PIRE Group

Copacabana

The Group

Ipanema

History of Cristo Redentor

Parque Lage was not very far from Corvocado, just a 15 minute drive. Esteban wanted to take us there because it is a very popular park, and a park with lots of history. Parque Lage also has an art museum, restaurant, fish tank and a small cave inside. 

Art Museum

Cristo Redentor from afar

Restaurant inside Museum

Cave

Parque Lage

 Regarding our research for Kaseya, Chad, our Project Manager gave us a deadline to have all our research topics done by Tuesday night. I was well ahead of schedule, so I had to research very little, Monday and Tuesday I just went over everything I researched to check for any grammatical errors. Once I completed my research, Chad gave us the remainder of the week off, and reminded us that come Monday, we start the next phase.

Ahhh, USASpending.gov launched a new "IT Dashboard" to provide statistical analysis over the spending data. Basically what I was trying to help IBM do. I am not sure how accurate it is but, it definitely is pretty to look at.

The biggest concern I have is that they are now adopting a completely new hierarchy which is the hierarchy for the CFO Act agencies. The CFO act agencies do not have a one to one relationship with the agencies in NIST SP 800-87 or FIPS 95-2!

I think I'm going to contact NIST, FIPS, FPDS, or anyone I can get a hold of and voice my concerns. We have a great research opportunity here and I'm going to do my best to exploit it

It was one of my most efficient research meetings ever~ Dr. Jean-Marc Jezequel, the leader of the whole INRIA team,  is really knowlegeable and healpful. After discussing our issues in the semantic simulation of our language in their Kermeta tool, he immediate sees the point and offered a few really useful suggestions on how things could be done. The good thing is, he does not tell you the specific solution, but rather give you a set of alternative views and let you decide the solution yourself, as you see fit. That might be, what they call " the autonomy of researchers", where students are trained as independent thinkers and problem solvers:) I really like this atmosphere of doing research~

To interest our blog readers, some pictures here from an annual musical festival in Rennes, it was really good and full with passionate people~

I realized there is no way to post-date these blogs. So, if you're reading this just keep in mind that the dates are not accurate. Barcelona is great so far settled into the apartment and found the lab. No one was there because it was late afternoon but, I will go back tomorrow morning and get all settled in.

I'm looking forward to working on a different domain other than government. It was fun but, I would definitely like to have a go at sports statistics and other historical data that we can use to predict the future! Hopefully we can create a crystal ball of sorts...or at least a magic 8 ball.

I've been trying to decipher the US government agencies hierarchy as contained in NIST SP 800-87 as well as its predecessor FIPS 95-2. Its become a mountain of a task due to all of the formatting inconsistencies and possible typos in the documents. The official government stance is that their hierarchy is contained in the PDF versions of the documents I mentioned and nowhere else. So we are forced to use those as our sources. systemT is doing a great job of helping us extract the information but, we are getting unwanted side affects due to the aforementioned formatting and typo issues.

I spoke with someone at NIST and they said that if we get this done we will be the first ever! = ) Lets keep working and see what happens.

Entering the Sagrada Familia: The church inside is as amazing as viewed from outside. I took the elevator up to the towers; you can see the whole city from the towers. The entrance fee is 11.50 E (student price) and taking the elevator up is 2.50 E. They do not accept credit cards so make sure you take cash. At the basement there is a large collection and museum of Antoni Gaudi and others involved in the construction of the Church.