Notes

I have been away from my blog for quite a long time. I have barely posted anything compelling in the last three years. Most of the updates were the sporadic announcements to ACM SigEvo’s GECCO conference, but event that was spotty at best. Yes, like everybody else, I gravitated toward social media (pick your favorite poison here). I spend quite a bit of time thinking what I wanted to use my blog for. Should it be the same kind of blog? Should I change it under the hood? Should I give it a golden retirement since it seems I have no stories to share anymore? Then in the mist of all this unanswered questions, I realized I wanted my blog to be what it has been all along. It is whatever I need it to be. Yes, some thoughts are faster to share on ephemeral social media outlets, but there are things you want to keep around longer. Hence, I decided to start a face lift as part of this renewed path. Talking about look and feel, I kept it pretty similar as you may have realized. No big changes, mostly layout updates, removing as much clutter as possible, a bit of font sprinkling here and there, but eventually trying to keep it pretty much the same. I guess that I like the cozy feeling of it feeling familiar. However, one thing I decided to change, after people I care deeply kept insisting that I should, was to build a more permanent home, as I mentioned earlier, for those moments you want to keep around long after the social media rapid timing has digested them into oblivion. Curating photos into gift wrapped packages you find while window shopping was one of those itches that help drove change. As a result of it, you may now see a photo stream top main menu entry. It is a running stream of some of the photos I share on my G+ profile. Under this running photo stream, you will find soon some of those gift-wrapped packages containing some of the photos I cannot shake away. Today, I am adding one. Make sure you check it out. Will this revamping of the blog make me post more often? That is another story. ...

On June 2013, I roamed the streets of Girona at night. It started feeling as an ephemeral compulsive need, a needed that could be easily tamed. Its recurrent nature ruled otherwise. I just kept going out at night. I just kept snapping away. I just kept walking over the old cobblestones. I just could not shake the itch. The transmutation of the eye kept charming me back. On June 2013, I roamed the streets of Girona at night. [pe2-gallery album=“http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/101892163699515371535/albumid/5891687846951531553?alt=rss&hl=en_US&kind=photo” ] ...

It has been a while since the last face lift to this blog. No, I was not planning any major revamp, but a simple one. Since it was released, I had the little green ShareThis button hanging around. I just wanted to balance a bit the elements on the page. I decided to reposition the button on the top right of the excerpts and on the post themselves. While doing the repositioning I decided to simplify a bit its functionality and replace the button with something a bit lighter and still with purpose. After giving it a bit of a thought I replaced it with Google’s +1 button for publishers. It looks a little best balanced and it does not clutter the layout. You can find more information on how to add the +1 button to your site can be found at the +1 button page for webmasters. ...

If you used to check my Twitter stream in the center column at the bottom of my blog, you would have noticed I have just replaced it with my Google Buzz profile stream instead. Yes, you can still see the my Twitter activity, but you will also be able to (1) see aggregated content/activity coming from other sources in one place, (2) subscribe to the stream, and (3) comment on each of the entries. As, I said, a minor update to improve its functionality a bit more. ...

You may find the slide deck and the abstract for the presentation we delivered today at the “Data-Intensive Research: how should we improve our ability to use data” workshop in Edinburgh. Abstract This talk will focus a highly scalable data intensive infrastructure being developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA) at the University of Illinois and will introduce current research efforts to tackle the challenges presented by big-data. Research efforts include exploring potential ways of integration between cloud computing concepts—such as Hadoop or Meandre—and traditional HPC technologies and assets. These architecture models contrast significantly, but can be leveraged by building cloud conduits that connect these resources to provide even greater flexibility and scalability on demand. Orchestrating the physical computational environment requires innovative and sophisticated software infrastructure that can transparently take advantage of the functional features and to negotiate the constraints imposed by this diversity of computational resources. Research conducted during the development of the Meandre infrastructure has lead to the production of an agile conductor able to leverage the particular advantages in the physical diversity. It can also be implemented as services and/or in the context of another application benefitting from it reusability, flexibility, and high-scalability. Some example applications and an introduction to the data intensive infrastructure architecture will be presented to provide an overview of the diverse scope of Meandre usages. Finally, a case will be presented showing how software developers and system designers can easily transition to these new paradigms to address the primary data-deluge challenges and to soar to new heights with extreme application scalability using cloud computing concepts. ...