New Lodging

Been in Austin, Texas, USA, since the evening of Thu 13-Nov-2008. The purpose? To attend Sun HPC Consortium and SC'08.

After staying at the Hilton Airport Hotel, earlier today I had to move to AT&T Education and Conference Center which is owned by the University of Texas at Austin.

One thing I immediately noticed at this AT&T center is its phone+network+TV setup.

The phone is IP-phone (Cisco 7941), the same as what our school (back in Singapore) are using.

The network + TV is exactly the same as the Mio Plan + Mio TV setup, which I happen to use at home. Both the router and the IP-based TV box are located in my room.

The router (2WIRE) looks exactly the same as mine, though it may be slightly bigger, and perhaps, of a different model.

The IP-based TV box looks exactly the same, though this one has an additional USB port at the front. Oh, and the brand is Motorola, while mine doesn't seem to carry a (recognizable) brand. And oh (again), the TV remote control is exactly the same too.

The internet seems to be free since I was not asked whether to pay for a 24-hr internet access (like what some other hotels do). Well, I'm just too lazy to find it out now. So, just plug-in the LAN cable, and everything is set to go.

The internet speed is pretty good too. I tested downloading a kernel-source rpm from an OpenSUSE repository in Germany, and got a reasonable speed (350+ KB/s). The speed was noticable faster when downloading from servers located in USA. Fetching a 170+ MB file (Sun Studio Express 11/08) took less than three (??) minutes to complete (about 4 MB/s).

Well, perhaps this relatively high internet speed is the good thing of staying in a university-owned or AT&T-sponsored accomodation (or whichever it is)...

[Note: “Sun Studio software [is FREE and] delivers a high-performance, optimizing C, C++, and Fortran developer toolchain for Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Linux operating systems, including support for multicore x86- and SPARC-based systems. The toolchain includes parallelizing compilers, code-level and memory debuggers, performance and thread analysis tools, OpenMP support as well as optimized math libraries. With a next-generation NetBeans-based IDE, development of multicore applications has never been easier.”]

[Note: “Sun Studio Express releases contain the latest features and enhancements under development. Express builds are fully-functional; the focus is on new features being introduced into the Sun Studio product”. I am personally enthutiastic with the latest Express version due to the inclusion of a new MPI performance analyizer tool.]

Lost...

and there goes the nice weekend...