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Day 1 of XSEDE
Last night was the student welcome dinner and we met a few students as well as the speaker, who is a physics/astronomy professor at the University of Illinois. So far, the conference has been pretty informational and interesting. I am currently attending a tutorial called Supercomputing in Plain English with Rida and Mercy. After listening to a simple overview on supercomputing, we did a practice exercise where we submitted a job to Boomer. Now we're learning more about memory allocation, which is a little less interesting to me. I may go to the intro to Python tutorial later. Later tonight, we are going to see the Arch which should be fun!
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Only 10 more days until XSEDE!
My first poster is coming along very well. I kind of enjoyed designing a layout and playing with color schemes, as well as organizing information to look organized and aesthetically pleasing. This week was definitely one of the most challenging. I realized I have been testing a certain parameter wrong, which is disappointing, but this project is a learning process, so I'm glad to have learned from my mistake. Also, a new error on the client side of the current database appeared that appears to only occur on my local machine. Unfortunately, I've been having some software issues and can't get one program to run on my computer. On the brightside, I managed to update the group's website, highlighting the current kdb and the changes being made to it. One obstacle I've noticed myself slowly overcoming is asking questions. I found K-12 not too challenging, and I never really had to rely on others, as I was able to struggle my way through something and find the answer. Even in my first year of college, I only went to office hours for Physics. If help is offered, I will take it, but it is harder for me to reach out for it on my own. I came into this program thinking I was okay at coding. I had taken a class in high school; I had a class on MATLAB last semester; I taught myself basic python from Code Academy. After learning about the project and still feeling unprepared, I knew I was going to need to ask for help, and so looking back over the whole summer, I definitely feel like it has become easier. It's been awhile since I have blogged! I can't believe it's already July 7th. There's only one month left in this program. It has gone by so fast. Well in the past weeks that I have forgotten to blog, I have written a test script that tests different parameters for the kdb query in association with eon and prints out the results to a file. I have also completed more queries, thereby practicing my sqlite and connecting tables. As a novice programmer, I may have taken a bit longer than my colleague could've done, but it is a learning process and being able to work at my own pace encourages me because once I finish a task, I feel proud of myself.
I need to start working on my poster and a presentation for it. I'm a bit nervous, but we'll see how it goes. My stage fright is pretty serious. I have presented two posters before for my nano stream, but it wasn't at a professional conference and I had someone else with me to help me present it. Being alone is a bit scarier, but I know I can make it. Yesterday was a good day. With a little help, I was able to write a script that creates a database and inserts data from a file read using another script that my coworker wrote. It's always a good feeling when code finally works, especially when you're kind of new at it. So far, it can only read POSCAR files consisting of one element, because ASE complains when there are two or more. Today, I'm working on querying and linking tables.
Earlier, I was running tests using data provided, but I didn't really like it because I didn't understand what was going on in the test because the code was extensive and my knowledge of the syntax is not that strong. SQL is more basic and feels less above my head, but still challenging and new enough to keep me interested, as well as helps me to practice my python. Off topic of research, last weekend was a lot of fun. Our group went kayaking and then DT and it made for much needed relaxation and lots of bonding. Today was my first day essentially working on my project and so far I am enjoying it. I will be working on building and refining a kinetic database.
Just to recap last week: we were trained for three days at TACC in various languages and parallel computing. Although it was long, the Linux lecture was definitely most useful to me because I had never seen nor used it before, and am now able to mildly navigate with it. Last Friday, I met with my mentor and to be quite honest, felt a little intimidated by the level of computation needed in the project. However, after reading the materials and studying up on the project, I felt a lot more comfortable with it. Today, I met another student with whom I will be working. We discussed the project again with Graeme and are now beginning some small tasks. I am going to work on the front end, and start with updating the webpage with information about the kinetic database and a little bit on how to use it. All in all, I feel a little apprehensive and challenged, but I know that I have all the help in the world and that working through this will only be for the better, so I'm excited to get started. |
Hayley SilvermanICERT REU 2015 Game Changer |