I can think of some great opportunities for scientific tools for data exploration/visualization, collaboration, social networking, etc. Just look at some of the example applications. Amazing stuff.

I am seriously considering buying a motorcyle (touring or dual sport). I've been looking around and I think I like the BMWs.

Dual sport:

• F640 GS
• R1200 GS

Touring:

• F800 ST
• R1200 ST

I think I like the R1200 GS more than the others but I wonder whether I should start with something smaller given that I haven't ridden for some time. Does anyone have any suggestions? Unfortunately the models available in Europe are not the same as the ones available here.

Any input would be appreciated, either as a comment here or directly to me.

After a long week of visits at Cornell, MIT, and Harvard, I had few days of holidays in New York (I love this city). As always when I am visiting a city (this was my second time in NY), I did lots of exploring and relaxing (no work! :-). It's been fantastic.

Today is the first day of the OAI-ORE meeting at Google's offices in New York. It's really cool here. The building's security person (not a Google employee) sent us to the wrong floor in the morning, thinking that we were all here for the recruitment event :-)

Lots of young people, very very good food (and free), and a great vibe.

My colleague Lee Dirks and I are visiting Cornell, MIT, and Harvard over the next few days, before I go to New York for few days of holidays and then an OAI-ORE meeting.

While at the meeting with the arXiv folks today, the "Middle Ages Tech Support" video was mentioned, which I thought was funny :-)

Today I also briefly caught up over beer with Einar. Great to see you pal! Waiting for your visit in Seattle :-)

Wow! I started using PopFly today and is sooooo cool! The "Create Mashup" tool is effectively dataflow (very much like Yahoo Pipes!) built using Silverlight so you can use it on the Mac too.

The "Create Page" is also interesting because of its Ribbon interface and editing capabilities.

The possibilities for scientific collaboration, especially around workflow/dataflows are great, straight from within a web browser.

There is a video about PopFly over on Channel 9.

Over the last couple of months, I've been organizing the Manycore Computing workshop, sponsored by my group. I've had the pleasure of interacting with top people from the industry and academia while putting together the program and list of attendees (the workshop is by-invitation only). We already have >70 people confirmed plus ~30 from Microsoft. We were originally aiming to invite around 100 people but it now seems that we are going to reach 120. The interest has been overwhelming.

I am looking forward to the discussions that will take place and the insight of all the technology leaders.

Woo hoo! He's back and he's full of energy! I got to spend some time with Lisa and Pat at Mix07 and had a blast with them. They did try to get me drunk and almost succeeded. I'll have to return the favor soon :-)

I am soooo excited to be interacting with Pat. His insights, energy, and passion are really motivating!

Tony Hey's slides on "The Social Grid" are now available (6.5MB PDF). This talk focused on the value of using the Web and its existing, stable technologies to deliver value to eScience. It also encouraged the Grid community to consider modern Web usage patterns and technologies, like "software-as-a-service", social networking, semantics, as the means to meet the scientist's requirements in a familiar-to-them manner.

It's so nice to see Jim here. We are about to embark on some pair-coding. The landscape around the conference's hotel is just breathtaking.

In few hours I will be flying to Banff for the WWW 2007 conference. Jim is also going to be there. Paul as well. Also, many others from the Web community so I am really looking forward to meeting everyone.

Well, the Vancouver half marathon over. I am not very pleased with my performance. I knew that I wasn't prepared as well I should have been, so I guess I should have expected this. I finished in around 2h3m (2 mins slower than last time :-(

This time I was careful and I did not repeat any of the mistakes from last time. However, I did learn few things that I hope I am going to improve upon next time:

• Prepare well!!!
• Adjust the pace to achieve the target time. I was not wearing a watch so I didn't know how fast I was really going. At the end I was relatively comfortable, so perhaps I could have gone faster.
• Train outdoors more. I think my knees are not used to running outdoors. Also, I have to train more for hills. I was taken by surprise by the many small hills in the course and especially that loooooong one around mile 8.
• Make sure I sleep well the night before. The youngsters next to my hotel room coming back from clubbing and deciding to watch a music channel from 2.30 to 3.30 in the morning didn't help :-(

A good experience overall. I enjoyed it. Now, for the next one.

Social networking is truly becoming part of our day-to-day lives. The Web is enabling some amazing scenarios. BBC is running a story on "social lending", which I found interesting, especially the relation of the approach to microfinancing.

I want one of these.

Imagine how useful for scientific computing this would be. I don't expect to get one but I am going to ask anyway :-)

Cooool.

"Researchers at the National University of Ireland, Galway's (NUIG) Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) have developed a search engine that can answer search queries with more than seven billion RDF statements in mere fractions of a second, which is the highest number recorded to date." (Super-fast RDF search engine developed)

A paper describing the engine (pdf) is available from the DERI press release.

Both my previous laptop's and my current one's graphic cards were from ATI's FireGL Mobility range (i.e. tuned for CAD and digital media content management applications). This meant that the drivers were not really targeting games. I was never able to start SecondLife.

Until today! I got an update from Windows Update and voila! SecondLife is alive for the first time :-)

I can't wait to start scripting to bridge the Web and the scientific world with the virtual environment of SecondLife. Need to find time. This was one of the projects Jim Gray and I were discussing in late 2006.

I took the opportunity to watch two shows in Las Vegas, while waiting for Mix 07 to start.

• " Love ", a  Cirque du Soleil production. I really enjoyed it. The colors, the music by Beattles, the acrobatics! However, I think I preferred Varekai.
• The Blue Man Group . Interesting but not extremely exciting. Enjoyable though.

I've spent lots of time with Pat Helland (who, btw, is back with Microsoft, in a different team, and I hope you'll be hearing a lot from him shortly) and his wife. They even came close to getting me drunk last night (I cannot even dare think how I am going to do at this Sunday's half-marathon, even though I've been running while here).

I also met the delegation from Greece. Really fun guys, with whom I had lots of interesting discussions. I have been spending lots of time chatting to Stelios Tzivakis, who has been responsible for many of the big IT related projects in Greece, including in.gr, the premier Greek portal. Extremely interesting and very nice guy. Oh, and he happens to be Kostas', whom I supervised when he was an MSc student in Newcastle, boss :-)

Mix so far has been fantastic. I've been extremely impressed with some of the demos and my brain has been working overtime on how the announced technologies could be used in the scientific/technical computing domains. I need to start getting my fingers dirty with coding again. This summer is going to be lots of fun!

Update: I forgot to mention that the BBC Radio 1 application blew me away.

I have been gaining a lot of program management experience managing my team's activities in the Many/Multicore area. I am even organizing a workshop in this area in June (more in a week or so). We have a very close interaction with Intel, which I enjoy tremendously (I will talk about the outcome of this activity sometime around July). I do not only get to experience first-hand the collaboration on key technologies between two of the largest companies in our discipline but I also get to meet and interact with really clever people. I feel really honored to regularly exchange messages with Microsoft folks like Burton Smith, Jim Larus, Michael Fortin. They have been leaders in this field for so many years! I get to participate in teleconferences with Andrew Chien and Intel folks like Wei Li, Jesse Fang, Jim Held, Geoff Lowney. All huge names in our industry! I truly feel honored and humbled. BTW... they are all going to be at the workshop I mentioned earlier (plus many more big names in the industry and research communities).

I also get to interact on a regular basis with those leading research projects we fund at various universities, like CS @ University of Tennessee (Jack Dongarra and his team), CS @ Indiana University (Dennis Gannon and Geoffrey Fox and their teams), Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Mateo Valero and his team), CS @ Rice University (John Mellor-Crummey and the team over there). It's just fantastic.

So, I've been doing a lot of learning and thinking around the space of Manycore computing. I feel like at home, given that High-Performance, Parallel Computing has been the area of my PhD research. However, when it comes to hardware, I must admit that even though there is an opportunity to learn lots, I don't find it particularly fascinating. When it comes to programming models, however, I can read and chat for hours.

A regular topic of discussion between Tony Hey, Geoffrey Fox, and I is the past success and the future relevance of functional/dataflow programming. I am very much a supporter of the dataflow model for computation, while the "pragmatists" (having come from a physics background :-) keep telling me that the "pure" model will fail again as it has in the past (I must admit, they are not saying in such strong words :-). Of course, the functional programming models didn't succeed in demonstrating that large software projects could succeed or that performance could match the explicitly-managed parallel applications on massively parallel systems.

I believe, as it is the case in so many areas, the right tool can be used for the right job. However, if we are to succeed in making parallelism mainstream, and we have to given the manycore architectures that will become available very fast, we need to provide tooling that implicitly manage parallelism, instead of directly exposing it to the programmers. I totally agree that there are going to be cases where highly-performance libraries with implementation of parallel algorithms/patterns will be programmed explicitly and made available for imperative programming.

I am glad to see that the industry and the research community are seriously looking into this space again. The article on StreamIt reminded me of this.

Interesting times to be into parallelism :-)