So it’s 2010 (pronounced twenty-ten, NOT two-thousand-and-ten) already, and I haven’t touched this blog in almost a year. The proposal that I had mentioned in the last post’s video ended up getting (partially) approved, and I’ve been working with a couple of professors to put a curriculum together for a course on parallel programming using GPU’s and building a small laboratory environment to support it. As I start consolidating all the information that I’ve gathered over the past semester, I plan to put up a series of posts introducing the topic.
On a more personal note, it seems that 2010 will be a year of transitions for me. I’ve basically wrapped up all my degree requirements last semester and am now actively employment. This, as well as some other recent events, has me contemplating whether staying in Atlanta is in my best interests (I’m not the only one). Regardless, this year I will be getting more directly involved in the local community. In 2009, I made a lot of connections with some great people and look forward to keeping that momentum going. More details to come.
In March, I had the opportunity to attend the SIGCSE conference in Chattanooga, which served as my introduction to the world of academic / professional conferences. While at the Intel booth, I chatted for a bit with Paul Steinberg, who was interviewing various people about their thoughts on the current push towards parallelism. Thankfully, I had something decent to say, thanks to my recent interest in HPC / visualization and the tech fee proposal I submitted this past winter.
Lesson learned #1: For any project that you are currently or potentially interested in working on, always keep a default pitch / breakdown of exactly what it is in the back of your mind. You never know when someone may ask you your thoughts on the matter.
Lesson learned #2: When faced with an impromptu interview, always take the time to spit out your gum.
Note: SPSU does indeed address concurrency in their CS curriculum, but it is done very much indirectly through the Operating Systems and Distributed Systems courses. I meant that there is currently no course that directly addresses programming for multicore systems.