So as some of you may have noticed, I missed that Carleton update after all. Suffice it to say that the year went and I’ve emerged relatively unscathed on the other side. There were some high points and some low points, but all-in-all things turned out okay, and I’m confident that the next years will be even better. I’m currently at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis working as an intern at the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute . I’m here through August 12th, at which point I will return to Omaha for a few days and then head off to Budapest for fall term.

I really can’t get over the size of the Univeresity here. It’s like they took the buildings at Carleton, magnified them, and then scattered them over an area half the size of Northfield. I will post some pictures once I free up some webspace, but suffice it to say that the student center has a bowling alley, a 400 person movie theatre, a foodcourt, and bookstore the size of Barnes and Nobles – and it’s only one of the two student centers!

The facilites at MSI (the Supercomputing Institute) are pretty amazing.
They have several super computers, and very nice labs full of Suns, SGIs, and high end Macs and PCs. More directly significant to me is our our research group’s office. We’ve got about 5 computers, including two Macs with 23 inch displays! Editing with vi never looked so good :). Again I’ll post some pictures soon.

The project itself seems pretty interesting. I’m actually working for a Geophysics professor who’s doing visualition of very large geological datasets. I’m not working on the visualization per say, but one of the goals is to make these visualiation tools available through the web in a standardized way. At this point I’m still learning the tools and frameworks we’re using (gSOAP for web services and NaradaBrokering as a GRID enabled middleware system). The other people who have worked on my particular part of the project are currently in Germany and Florida, so I’ve had to learn a lot on my own, but I think I’m starting to get a hold of things.

As a whole, the research group seems pretty close, and it’s kind of cool to be part of a group like that. There’s currently a visitor from Poland helping out, another intern from Oberlin, and several from the University of Minnesota.

I’m still figuring things out, but I think it’s going to be okay. I’ll post pictures soon.