Geek in Practice

I’ve been Wondering if I ever been to a safari or not. Well, I haven’t and I can’t see I will ever be in the foreseeable future but, in anyway, Linuxing can be as intriguing as going to a safari. I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux ever since it was only a Dapper Drake (although either fictional or not living in a safari). I loved the operating system, society and embraced the concept and philosophy! I became an official exclusive Linuxer around Gutsy Gibbon when I gave Windows the axe and the boot out of my hard disk. That’s when the adventure started. When I decided to enjoy the mishaps of Linux. When I started to see the million ways The Gimp is better than Photoshop (you might argue it’s not, but embrace the philosophy and you won’t). Along the way, when I was upgrading and waiting for every 6 months for a Heron or an Ibex to come by, I was always thinking to wear a fedora or capture a lizard. Until it finally came, two months after introducing Ubuntu to my roommate, I was playing around with my Jackalope he decided to buy a laptop (Thankfully he didn’t need to pay the Microsoft Tax). He decided to try out three Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE). I thought I should move on too. I downloaded OpenSUSE and, here I am, loving the experience. What I like the most is that we have 3 machines in the room and each has a different distribution of Linux and nothing else to be found!

What I also like, is how all three of them are basically the same yet so different. I felt a bit lost at first then it clicked all of a sudden! Am I going to play with a Koala instead of my newly captured Lizard? Let’s wait and see! I’m only wondering why OpenSUSE is the dark side of Linux?

After two good weeks in London, I think I had a good break. Is it good enough to start my mental engines again? I think not! But I’ll do it anyway! All in all, It was well needed and well deserved and I’m more relaxed now than two weeks ago for sure!

When I started this post I was still in London but for some reason, not even known to me,I didn’t continue my draft. I wanted to just have a look back at my trip to London. Luckily for me, I didn’t go all the way. On my way back, I sat next to some Englishman in the first row of a world traveler class on a British Airways Boeing 767. The guy turns out to be Andrew Wenfer, an IBM corporate senior employee. He was on the way to Saudi Arabia because he was on a mission to build a supercomputer. Wait, what? He is one of the developers responsible to connect and build up Shaheen Blue Gene/P in KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology), the 14th most powerful computer in the world, in my homeland. Being a geek, I was so excited, of course! He showed me how a Blue Gene computer is assembled, connected, and ran! What got me more excited is that I knew already about Shaheen which operating system is Linux based (see: The Linuxologist and Top500.org).

This machine is so super it has 16,384 quadcore CPUs distributed to 16 racks, each rack has 1024 CPUs. WOW! To add more to the awe, each cpu is directly connected to 6 other ones forming a cube of CPUs around each and every CPU. The ones on the edges are connected to the other end so they form a full cycle (such system is called Taurus, developed also by IBM). And they all run together simultaneously, could run at NO TIME SHARING! According to Mr. Wenfer, it consumes 40 megawatts a day yet it’s still green in comparison to our regular computers! Also, they had a very sophisticated cooling system which keeps all CPUs on a relatively low temperature. I was, honestly, dumbstruck when showed me the photos of a Blue Gene computer he built, they look magnificent. He also showed me how it works, virtually. I wish to directly thank King Abdullah for the most powerful computer in the middle east.

Other than that, we talked about the regular Saudi-Westerner chat. Weather, Islam, weather, human rights,weather, women rights… etc. I always thought that, lately, westerners learned a little more about Saudi Arabia due the exposure we had in the last few years but turns out that they only know that women don’t drive around here, lol!