Fault tolerant computing

As a first step to writing my own simulation code while attempting to do something useful, a few days ago I started writing a code to explore failure and recovery from failure in a distributed computation. By failure in this case, I mean when one of the computation units goes down. My test system is N harmonic oscillators on N nodes (or processes on a shared memory machine). Read More …

The Intersection of Productivity and Joy (over the past months)

Since last we spoke a couple of months ago, I had a hell of a time personally: I moved house, went from one location to another too often, had a major and very stressful financial crisis and had some rough times with friends which rocked the emotional boat. Although there are many things which didn’t Read More …

Kliq Soft Launch

Kliq soft launched this weekend. You can schedule a meetup (dinner, drinks, you name it) in just a few thumb taps with your local facebook friends or be adventurous and be introduced to a friend of a friend. This is just a taste of what’s to come. Get Kliq on the iPhone App Store at http://itunes.apple.com/lt/app/kliq/id412169676 or visit http://kliq.in. Read More …

Introducing phygg

My Sunday afternoon recover-from-jetlag hack was creating http://www.phygg.com. Phygg is designed to help sort through physics papers and discussion topics related to arXiv.org in the style of digg.com, initially focusing on astrophysics. I’m going to be using phygg to track papers I find interesting, so feel free to follow the rss feed. In addition, I’m hoping to convince a few of my astrophysicist colleagues to join in on the posting and voting, so stay tuned. Read More …