brain exercises

I read from a book while I was strolling at National bookstore that using your left hand to brush your teeth (if you are right-handed) exercises your brain. So right now, I'm using a left-handed mouse on my computer and I feel I am getting smarter by the second. You should also try it.

Last week I was accepted as the SOSE cluster system administrator of the SOSE Grid. I'm not very familiar with a lot of aspects of grid computing so I am currently doing some reading about it. From what I understand, the project is actually a collaboration of many international institutions. The purpose of the Grid project is to provide a grid to various research projects that need them, one of which is in the field of e-Science. Grid users "submit" computationally intensive tasks which, for a normal computer, would take some time to finish.

So far, I've read that various grid projects around the world (e.g. SETI@home) are successful in creating a grid of several thousands of computers (go to Wikipedia for more details), and they are able to achieve very fast computational speeds. The biggest question on my mind right now though is how are application developers able to separate a complex computational task into several independent tasks that are run on each node of the grid (in order to harness the power of grid computing, each node should as much as possible not need any input from other nodes, the task that it receives should be independent of other tasks passed to other nodes). I guess I still have to do more reading in the future. But for the meantime, since developing grid applications is not part of the job description, I should still be OK. The responsibilities include:

1. UNIX/Linux system administration
2. Day-to-day cluster monitoring and maintenance
3. Monitoring of cluster usage
4. Troubleshooting
5. Documentation
6. Hardware and software installation
7. Ensuring cluster system security
8. Recommend hardware and software acquisition for cluster improvement and maintenance
9. Support users by answering questions, standardizing and configuring their environments, obtaining tools, writing appropriate documentation and other support materials.
10. Write semestral/term reports related to the cluster system (e.g., usage, problems, needs, acquisition, etc.)