Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Doctoral Comedy: Which Way Is The Door?

One of the great lessons of sociology is the power of shared experience, whether positive or negative, to create deep and lasting human bonds. From the horror and misery of war and abduction (Stockholm syndrome) through the fun and excitement of athletic camaraderie and competition to the caffeine and adrenalin fueled pressure of a "ship or die" venture-funded startup, shared experiences can define one's life. This even extends to pursuing a Ph.D., where the long, sometimes strange and unpredictable journey can create its own ethos and breed a certain gallows humor.

This is why I am enjoying the great comic strip, Piled Higher and Deeper, also known as PhDComics, drawn by Jorge Cham. As an aside, the phrase "piled higher and deeper," of course, is an old and hoary wordplay on the progression from B.S. through "more of the same" (M.S.) to – all together now – "piled higher and deeper." (Ph.D.) If you ever spent Saturday night working in the lab, and every graduate student has, you understand the stable cleaning analogy.

The first time I saw the PhDComics strip, I knew that Jorge must have been a Ph.D. student, because only someone who has experienced graduate school and faculty life, particularly in a technical discipline, could have that much insight regarding the joy and misery of graduate student life and the trials and foibles of faculty members. I spent thirty years in that world, and I recognize myself, my friends and my colleagues in the strip. (No, not thirty as a graduate student, though it certainly seemed so at the time!) Perhaps the following anecdotes will trigger some memories of your own.

The Netherworld

As a graduate student, you live in a netherworld, not quite a student nor a faculty member either. The undergraduate students see you as faculty, especially if you are a teaching assistant, and the faculty members see you as a student, especially if you have not yet crossed the River Styx, otherwise known as the Ph.D. qualifying examination. From the university's bureaucratic perspective, you are a chameleon, classified as either a student (see parking privileges and health benefits) or staff (see student discounts and athletic tickets) when convenient.

One of my Illinois Ph.D. students came to our weekly group meeting absolutely furious. He'd driven to the Digital Computer Laboratory (DCL) about 3 A.M. that morning to check on the progress of some research simulations. When he returned to his car about 15 minutes later, he found a ticket on his windshield. My student was absolutely adamant that it was unfair and that he would not pay the fine. It looked like a mano-a-mano smackdown – irate graduate student versus implacable bureaucracy.

I was sympathetic; after all, Urbana at 3 A.M. has a surfeit of parking places. I asked him on which of the streets near DCL he'd parked his car. He asked why it mattered. I patiently explained that some of the streets were within the jurisdiction of the university police, whereas others were within the jurisdiction of the city of Urbana. The city – and by extension, the U.S. government – might have the power to fine him, jail him or even deport him, but the university wielded a far more important power over his fate and future. It could prevent him from graduating by simply encumbering his records for failure to pay a parking ticket. Because he had parked on a university street, he had no choice; he wanted a Ph.D.; he paid the fine. Final score: university 1; graduate student 0.

The Weekly Meetings

If you have been a graduate student or a faculty member, you remember the weekly meetings with your advisor (advisees) and the group meetings and seminars. Each brings certain perspectives, and they become conjoined over time, whether it be foraging for free seminar food, trying to impress people by asking questions or simply staying awake and trying to look interested.

One my first Ph.D. students, a truly fantastic researcher who is now a very successful computer science faculty member himself, once asked me at a professional conference if there had ever been intervals where I had wondered if he were doing anything useful in the lab. After confessing that it had crossed my mind a time or two, he laughed and said he understood, as he now wondered the same about his own students.

How Many Years?

At some point during my graduate career at Purdue, I was having dinner with the parents of a friend of mine. Her mother asked when I expected to graduate, and I said, "In a year or so, I think." She replied, "That's what you said last year." In fact, I had said the same thing the year before, and both times I had been hoping it was true. Of course, she didn't know that asking a graduate student when they will finish their thesis is a bit like asking someone about their weight or their income. As the PhDComics strip notes, it's best not discussed in polite company.

In that spirit, I also distinctly remember leaving a Friday night, midnight campus showing of The Deer Hunter, thinking the odds were high that my tombstone would list me as an A.B.D. graduate student with the epitaph, "Felled by one last thesis revision." That one sentence captures so many elements of the graduate experience. First, I left the movie alone and on foot, because I had no date and no car. Second, I was attending a midnight $1 movie because I living on rather miniscule graduate fellowship stipend with little discretionary money. (See my previous comment about having no date and no car.) Third, it was The Deer Hunter, a great movie but a truly depressing moral meditation on war and death, perhaps not the best choice for a midnight screening, especially for a graduate student. Without hesitation, I walked directly back to my office in the Purdue Mathematical Sciences building and worked all night on my dissertation. I had to graduate, and I did!

Crazy Thesis Topics

My dissertation was on a wild and crazy idea – building parallel computers using large numbers of microprocessors and programming them via message passing. Like most dissertations, nothing came of it, because we all recognized the importance of purpose-built parallel systems that balanced computation, communication and I/O and that were programmed using new languages and tools that focused on human productivity. A long-term, industry-government-academic partnership in the early 1990s produced the balanced, highly productive, near-exascale systems we use today for breakthrough computational science and national defense.

What's that you say? You mean we are using commodity microprocessors and message passing for parallel computing? Bummer! I must have confused this reality with a parallel earth in a many worlds quantum interpretation.

Shared Experiences

Like most humor, the rueful elements of truth are what make PhDComics fun. I formed some of my most intense, lifelong friendships in graduate school, both with my fellow students and with faculty, especially my thesis advisor. (Yes, we called him Herb, and he was a great guy) The highs and lows, the parties, the late nights in the lab, the uncertainty and the satisfaction – they are what make research in academia a special place.

PhDComics captures all of this. It's a smash hit in the academic community, with appearances in Science, Nature and a host of other places. Here's to Jorge and continued success. (Hint, buy the books and read the strip.)

The Power of Plum Jelly

The dilapidated two story house marked the corner of two single lane roads in the Arkansas hills, and it was old and weather-beaten long before I was born. The windows stared sullenly at the sky, covered only by cheap roller shades that had never seen better days. A rusted tin roof (iron actually, but we called it tin), covered the house, hammered by the summer rains.

The old man who sat on the house's little porch was as tired and gray as the ramshackle house. He was divorced, a small scandal in the churchgoing town, and like the tin roof, he had been hammered by life's insistent pains. No family visited and no children called; he had neither telephone nor car. He looked forward to nothing. He was a patient man, though, and he sat quietly and without complaint, waiting to die.

I knew all this from observation, as I rode my bicycle along the dirt roads around his house and mine; I'd also heard the furtive whispers of divorce when my parents and grandparents talked about him. Everyone called him "Ole Man" Smith. It was such a common moniker that only later did I realize that "Ole Man" was not his first name.

The Canning Frenzy

Summer was the time for gardening and canning, for my family, like those around us, depended on home-canned food to see us through the winter. Because we were poor, we canned green beans, poke greens, peaches and corn, and we either froze juice or made jelly from blackberries, strawberries and plums. It was a frenzy of picking, cleaning, processing and storing. It was my mother's summer duty, and it was my job to help when and where I could.

During the few weeks the plums ripened, we picked them from our trees and from the ground. They were small, no bigger than the end of my thumb, struggling to grow in the rocky clay. The first time I saw plums in a city grocery store, I was stunned; they were nearly the size of tennis balls! I shook my head in wonderment at how hard my mom had worked to make jelly from those small plums. But I digress …

After pulling the stems and cutting away the bad spots with a knife, the plums are washed and then squeezed with a colander to produce the juice. After adding some sugar and pectin, the mixture was ready to pour into the Mason or Ball jars and place in the pressure cooker.

It was hot and tiring summer work. As my grandfather would say, it was "warm, powerful warm." When it's 95F in the shade, it's 110F in the kitchen, with steam escaping the pressure cooker and hot jars cooling on the windowsill. I've seen those jars explode, flinging hot peaches and syrup across room. It's not a pretty sight.

In the middle of all this, my mother looked out the kitchen window at Ole Man Smith sitting on his porch in front of the old house across the road. Without ado, she announced, "We're making plum jelly for him." And so we did.

The Gift of Jelly

A week later, I marched up to Ole Man Smith's front porch. I was holding my box of cargo carefully in both hands. I wasn't very big, it was heavy, and I knew I'd best not drop it and break the jars. "My momma asked me to bring this to you," I said. "She made it for you," I added.

I watched a panoply of expressions play across his face. First, there was the fear that I was selling plum jelly door-to-door. He fumbled with this wallet, pulling a few dog-eared one dollar bills from inside. I assured him that my momma had told me two things, very clearly. First, that I was to deliver this box of jelly jars to him. Second, and even more importantly, under no circumstances was I to accept any money from him in return.

"It's a gift from her," I added unnecessarily.

Fear was replaced by surprise that my momma had thought of him. Gratitude and appreciation soon followed. There was enough jelly to last a man all winter, perhaps even two winters.

"I reckon this will go real good with some biscuits," he said.

As he picked up the box, he turned and said, "Tell your momma, I'm much obliged." Then he did something I'd never seen him do before – he smiled.

The Lesson Learned

I walked home feeling all warm inside, knowing that even as the delivery boy I'd done a good thing. That one box of plum jelly taught me more about the power of unexpected kindness than a hundred Sunday school lessons. It really was more blessed to give than to receive.

I realized much later that she sent me as the delivery boy to save her and the old man the embarrassment of a gift offered and a gift gratefully accepted. Though she never said so, I suspect it was also so that I might be a part of the gift.

As we face difficult economic times, with people losing jobs and houses, seeing hopes dashed and dreams deferred, it's important to remember the power of simple kindness. Support your neighbor, do a good deed, help a stranger. Even the small things matter, sometimes they matter most of all.

Together, we can make a difference, and we will each be better for it. The plum jelly taught me that.

 

The (Scientific) Good News

I was ten years old when I saw the light – the scientific light. For me, it was a Road to Damascus experience, catalyzed by a single event. My grade school teacher instructed each of the students to select a single, thin volume from the science encyclopedia and begin reading quietly at his or her desk. In retrospect, I realize it was probably the desperate act of an overwhelmed teacher who simply wanted a bit of quiet time. For me, though, it was a transformative revelation, a portal on a world of rationality, cause and effect and experiment-driven understanding.

For all those nagging questions, there was a systematic, repeatable mechanism to obtain and verify answers. The world could make sense, and the unknown was knowable. There were other people like me, and I could dream of being one of them – a scientist! It was thrilling and wondrous, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I had found the passion of my life.

The Universal Passion

Over the past 40+ years, that passion has led me to extraordinary and unexpected places. Yet across all that diversity, I have observed a universal behavioral constant, one that transcends national borders, cultures and languages. Scientists and scientific thinking are the same everywhere. They see the world through the same eyes and value the same things, a common approach to problem solving and reasoning. Above all, though, they share the passion and the curiosity, the unrelenting desire to know, to understand.

What drives us? It's not tenure; it's not publication; it's not research funding. Those are artifacts. It's not even fame, fortune or glory, though a few scientists seek those too. Rather, it's the desire to know, to understand, to add a small piece to the varied mosaic that is our limited but expanding human knowledge of this vast and varied universe. Depending on your assessment of the Fermi Paradox, perhaps it's to be the first sentient being in this brane to understand a small bit of its workings. If knowledge is your passion, that is reward enough.

Childlike Curiosity

Soon after I had completed my Ph.D., I read Peter Medawar's great book, Advice to a Young Scientist, and resonated with his insightful words:

I am often asked, "What made you become scientist?" But I can't stand far enough away from myself to give a really satisfactory answer, for I cannot distinctly remember a time when I did not think that a scientist was the most exciting possible thing to be.

I am no behavioral psychologist, but I suspect that all children are born with the insatiable curiosity that sustains scientific curiosity. All too often, though, I fear that our educational system punishes curiosity and rewards conformity. Only a small fraction remains sufficiently iconoclastic and self-confident to resist, asking those seemingly annoying questions that defy authority and drive discovery.

Why? It's a simple but profound question.

"Daddy, why is the sky blue?" It's Raleigh scattering, of course!

"Mommy, why does is it cold in winter?" It's axial tilt of the Earth! (Sadly, a stunning fraction of North American college graduates believe it's because the Earth is closer to the sun during the summer.)

"Daddy, why are insects not as big as elephants?" It's about surface area, volume and energy, as Haldane explained in his delightful essay, On Being the Right Size. (Ignore the politics at the end.)

The answers to simple questions often expose deep truths. Encourage and preserve the curiosity of children. Share the wonder; share the passion; share the good news. Scientists and children – they are more alike than different.

A Taste of Sherbet

As we face a global economic crisis that rivals or exceeds anything most of us have ever experienced, the western world's traditional holiday season is in flight. In the U.S., we are teetering in that interregnum between the Presidential election and the Inauguration, between the celebrations of Thanksgiving and the New Year, between economic security and economic desolation. All of which reminds me yet again how important – how absolutely critical – opportunity really is, as the nourishment of dreams imagined and unimagined.

Herewith is a modest story from my own past, recreated as best I can from my memory as a boy in a small southern town. I wasn't special, I was just fortunate; someone gave me an unexpected opportunity, a chance when none seemed possible. It was just a taste of sherbet, but it was a glimpse of a world unknown.

Each of us bears generational debts that can only be paid forward. It is especially important to pay those debts now, in these perilous economic times. I am still trying to pay mine, grateful debtor that I am.

Ozark Poor

It was a small Arkansas town like thousands of others scattered across the American South, where poor people gathered to hear fundamentalist preachers rail against the evils of sin and threaten eternal damnation for all who strayed from the straight and narrow way. I was ten years old, wearing my Sunday best, sitting on a hard church bench as the preacher opened the doors to hell and showed us the fiery punishment that awaited pool sharks, pinball wizards, card players, dancers of all kinds, and beer drinkers too. If Cotton Mather had not already cornered the market on sinners in the hands of an angry God, Meredith Wilson's The Music Man would have covered the rest (though we couldn't dance). If it was fun, we eyed it warily; odds were it was a sin.

We walked out of church on that muggy Sunday night in the Ozark foothills, and to my stunned surprise, my daddy said we were going to the town's only restaurant for coffee. This was so extraordinary that the event is burned indelibly in my memory after over forty years. We were poor; not lower middle class, not blue collar, not economically challenged, just backwoods, red clay poor. We weren't the only ones who knew what it was like to eat Saltines and Mason jars of tomato juice and be thankful for government commodities – surplus food distributed to the poor. Nor were we the poorest of the poor either; the parents of the little girl up the road couldn't afford to buy her a writing tablet for school. We just happened to be the Arkansas hillbilly clan (but outsiders called us that at the risk of a fistfight) of the southern poor Rick Bragg later chronicled so poignantly in All Over But The Shoutin'

Lessons Learned Early

I was just a kid, but I knew all of this without being told. When you lead a hardscrabble life, you learn certain things early. Life is not fair. Don't expect things you can't possibly have, even if others do. Don't ever shame your parents in public – the hurt in their eyes is punishment enough. Above all, don't dream things that can't come true. New blue jeans from the seconds store always trumped fantasies from the Sears Christmas Wishbook.

I knew money was precious, and it wasn't to be wasted. Going to the diner was a truly profligate expense, a Beluga caviar and Dom Pérignon event for a family that ate home canned green beans and hand-picked polk salad. It was not something we did often.

I realized later that my dad, despite working for the princely sum of $40/week (less than the federal minimum wage at the time), was a proud man. He wanted to socialize, to see and be seen, despite the fact that a dollar cost him an hour of labor in the hot sun. Off to the restaurant we went, the expense be damned. (Of course, I wouldn't have dreamt of saying damned; that would have been a sin.)

A Small Town Diner

Let's talk backwoods culture for a moment. The word restaurant conjures unwarranted images of grandeur. It was a small town diner -- a truck stop diner – built from cinder blocks with a flat roof and a tile floor. I can still close my eyes and see the worn Formica on each table and the cracked naugahyde that covered the booths. There were two big, semi-circular booths in the front corners, three standard booths on each side, a counter along the back and 4-5 tired looking tables in the middle. An old Wurlitzer jukebox and that work of the devil -- a pinball machine – stood guard on each side of the screened front door.

My parents and I walked into the diner, and my daddy spied two families from church sitting in the corner booth, next to the pinball machine. Spira mirabilis! These people were, by my family's standards, as rich as John D. Rockefeller. The mothers were dressed in new, store-bought clothes with real costume jewelry, and the fathers were wearing real suits with ties.

I was afraid, not just because we might not be able to afford to be there, but because we were mighty close to sin and damnation. I knew both the jukebox and the pinball machines were works of the devil, only one step removed from that true den of iniquity down the road – the pool hall – and I could see them both from where I stood.

Nevertheless, I'd been in the diner before with my parents, and I had watched in awe as some teenager placed a quarter in the jukebox. Imagine, having a quarter to spend on music! The jukebox arm moved, picked up and played 45 RPM records one by one, three of them for a quarter. The pinball machine was even worse, though, 'cause it had gaudy images designed to lure tired truckers into spilling a few coins on a game of chance. The diner's air conditioner was running, itself a wonderful experience compared to the box fan at home, but I could feel the heat from Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace.

Without a word, I slipped into a nearby booth with the other kids. In due time, the waitress came to take orders from my parents (coffee and a Coke), then stopped to see what I wanted. I knew better than to order anything without my daddy's permission, so I looked up and saw him watching me. He nodded slightly, and I ordered what I knew that meant – a ten cent Coke, a rare treat.

While I savored that cool goodness, the six year old boy sitting across from me was toying with something wondrous and amazing, something I had never seen. The concoction nestled cold, orange and creamy in the bowl, and moisture glistened like rough cut diamonds on the chilled surface. I watched transfixed as he poked idly at that creamy deliciousness, bored and sated. It was orange sherbet; it was a world beyond my reach.

To my surprise, the boy pushed the bowl across the table, said he wasn't hungry and asked if I'd like a taste. Did I ever! Boys like me didn't eat sherbet; we'd never seen sherbet; we'd never even heard of it. Orange Nehi was more our speed, in a world circumscribed by fried okra and cucumber salad.

I didn't need to be asked twice. I grabbed the bowl and spoon before he changed his mind. It was the creamiest thing I had ever tasted, orange, cold and delicious. It was just a taste of sherbet, but it was a glimpse into a world unseen, one where dreams were possible, where they might even come true. It was just a taste of sherbet, but it changed my life. I can still taste it even now.

Realizing Dreams

For years, I studied and dreamed. At the sawmill where my daddy worked and for a time I did too, the tourists stopped to take pictures, because they thought it was a scene right out of Deliverance. They didn't understand how hard people struggled day to day.

I was lucky; I escaped via the kindness of teachers who arranged the National Merit examination and a scholarship funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller foundation. I am thankful to this day.

My dreams have come true. I've traveled the world, seen amazing things, communed with the rich and powerful, studied with the wise and knowledgeable. I even own a pool table, though I can't play pinball for the life of me without hearing the preacher's voice warning of sin and eternal damnation.

Still, it's the sherbet I remember. Each time I see dreams deferred, hope abandoned and opportunity denied, my thoughts turn back to that Arkansas diner and that hot summer night. I wish I could offer everyone a taste of sherbet and the chance I have had at a life not yet unimagined.

Make no mistake, the sherbet really matters. It is the hope and the dream of the future. Share the sherbet, share the opportunity. Repay the generational debt. It matters -- now more than ever.

SC: The Family Gathering

It's "supercomputing week," which means that almost everyone who can spell HPC and who can walk, drive, swim or fly will be in Austin, Texas during the week of November 16 for SC08. Drawing on my youth, there will be preaching (academic papers, vendor presentations and government meetings), singing (on second thought, maybe not – geeks are not best known for their performing arts ability) and an all day dinner on the grounds (receptions, parties and dinners). In short, it's the place to see and be seen, or perhaps not to be seen if you are spending all of your time in closed door meetings with vendors or government officials.

I have been attending SC (the conference formerly known as Supercomputing XY) since 1990. Sadly, I missed the first one in Florida, where Seymour Cray gave the opening keynote, and the second one in Reno, Nevada. It is interesting to reflect on how much the conference has changed over twenty years.

Remembering the Big Apple

In 1990, the conference was held in a New York hotel. The technical papers presentations were all in a single ballroom, and the small (and I do mean small) vendor booths and demonstrations were in a second, nearby ballroom. I have two particular memories of that 1990 event, beyond a long meeting about trace formats for parallel system performance analysis.

The first concerns the humble beginnings of academic research booth space. Unlike today's massive show floor, with academic and laboratory booths that rival those of major vendors, the research exhibit space consisted of two or three draped tables. I distinctly remember Jack Dongarra sitting at one of the tables with a SUN workstation, demonstrating linear algebra software.

My second memory of 1990 was the apparent disappearance of the Intel vendor booth. As I recall, the truck containing the Intel booth arrived at the hotel loading dock, to be met by a group of workers who assured the driver that hotel rules required them to unload the truck. The truck contents – Intel's booth – disappeared and were (to my knowledge) never seen again. (I always wondered what the thieves did with an exhibit booth. I suspect there were too unhappy groups that day, Intel and the people who absconded with the booth.) Intel did manage to create a very nice booth using some backup materials, however. Welcome to the Big Apple!

Experiencing New Mexico

In 1991, I was a member of the SC program committee, which was chaired by the late Ken Kennedy. That year, the conference was held in Albuquerque, NM, in the convention center, leading to substantial expansion of the scale and scope of the conference.

That year, I created a research booth (a massive 10'x10') space that highlighted the results of our DARPA-sponsored Pablo project and the performance measurement and visualization tools we were developing. I remember that we printed some black-and-white posters to stick on a backdrop and distributed "booth duty" among the group of students, staff and me (the professor).

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) occupied the equally spacious 10'x10' space next to my booth. I remember watching with fascination when the LLNL team arrived on Sunday with several sections of 8' PVC pipe, elbow connectors, and a hacksaw. They then built a frame for their booth. This was literally cutting edge technology from our national laboratories!

Looking Forward to Austin

As always, I am looking forward to the meeting. It is a chance to see old friends, make some new ones, trade rumors and stories, survey the evolution of technology and discuss the future. It will also be a new experience for me, as a member of Microsoft. Kyril Faenov and his team have accomplished some impressive things with Windows HPC Server 2008 and I look forward to seeing the discussion of clouds, multicore and the future of HPC services.

Coming full circle to Seymour Cray, this year, I was pleased to chair the IEEE Seymour Cray Award committee and select my old friend Steve Wallach as the honoree. The award will be presented at SC08. By the way, you might want to check out Steve's new venture – Convey (that's Convex plus one).

In addition to my usual random walk across the convention and exhibit floors, attending technical paper sessions, private meetings and participating in Microsoft events, I will be speaking at several events:

• "Designing Data Centers for Future Cloud Applications," at the Power Efficiency and the Path to Exascale Computing workshop, on Sunday, November 16
• "Will Electric Utilities Give Away Supercomputers with the Purchase of a Power Contract?" a panel on Wednesday, November 19
• "There Is No More Sequential Programming. Why Are We Still Teaching It?"" a parallel programming education at the Intel booth on Wednesday, November 19

Finally, check out Todd Gamblin's Thursday afternoon paper presentation on scalable performance analysis for very large systems. It's pretty cool, though I am biased, as a thesis advisor!

Preaching, singing (well, maybe not) and dinner on the grounds – sounds like fun. I suspect there will a few margaritas and some barbeque consumed as well.