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I'm a fan of dry techie humor...such as this accumulation of quotes from Sandia Nat'l Labs.
I also do a bit of creative writing when the mood takes me. I'll add more as I have time.
I love the mountains! Here's a shot of me at 14,267' atop Torrey's Peak in Colorado. Awesome view! I hope to someday trek thru the Himalayas. Everest has become too crowded, but to the west lie Dhauligiri and Annapurna both of which are also over 8000 meters in height and are located in a more remote region. Closer to home, both Mount Rainier in Washington state and Pico de Orizaba in Mexico fixate me as well.
I've also taken an interest in BBQing & Smoking. Nothing is ever as simple as it looks, but I am improving with every attempt. Some of my most recent products can be viewed here.
Currently teaching myself Fortran 90 with Fortran 90 for Engineers and Scientists by Nyhoff and Leestma. It is, in my opinion, a great text. I recommend it highly. I have also provided a lengthy list of Fortran resources for others with similar needs or interests.
I love supercomputing! Both historically as well as current and future trends and technologies. As Seymour Cray was the undisputed "father" of the supercomputer, I was elated to find that the first Cray ever built, Cray-1 S/N 0001, was on display at Supercomputing 2008 in Austin, TX.
I'm also a big supporter of Open Source and GPL'd software in lieu of expensive, buggy commercial products. I have been using Linux exclusively for the past 5 years as my desktop solution with no need for commercial packages. For a list of open source alternatives, click here!
My favorite techie web site is the Arstechnica Forum. Well maintained with many thread categories and a very large base of contributors.
I work for the University of Arkansas at the Main Campus in Fayetteville where I'm the Senior Administrator for High Performance Computing. As of May 2, 2008 my office is located in ADSB 239-B.
Currently, my primary responsibility is the maintenance and upkeep of the Star of Arkansas supercomputer. The Star of Arkansas has 1256 compute cores and a sustained performance of 10.75Teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) and joins only 33 entries from other academic institutions in the United States on the Top500 list in June of 2008. On May 21, 2008, the Star of Arkansas ran the largest parallel user application ever to have run on a supercomputer in Arkansas. A Physics researcher ran a simulation distributed across 1240 compute cores on the system to completion. This job would have taken at least one year to complete on a modern desktop PC, but it completed in just 4.5 hours on the Star of Arkansas!
Before this job, I spent 20 years doing techie jobs in the corporate world. AAAAARRGGHHH!!! The Dilbert comic strips by Scott Adams have it SO RIGHT! Oh well, lesson learned. I now keep a wide berth between myself and that "alternate reality".
