Hello, hello, hello, hello…
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone home?
Yeah. I know. It’s been like 6 and a half months. So much for the E-Diary documenting the things I was doing. This is more like a “Yes, I’m alive” page. But, eh. It’s not like I have people on the edge of their seats eagerly waiting to hear what I say. Anywho, yes, I’m alive and I’ve been up to a few things over the last many months.
I’ve completed my internship at Rochester Institute of Technology as a Cybersecurity Visiting Student Research intern, working under Professor Matthew Wright for around 7 months. The details of the internship can be found at the Internships section on my achievements page. During the internship, I worked on parallelizing a ton of processes and I was able to reduce a pipeline that took many hours to test to a mere 40 minutes. I spawned processes and did all sorts of parallel computing “high-tech” things like reduction and message passing while considering all the data races and edge cases. This is the standard procedure to write parallel programs, but I’m pleased that I did these things without having been taught parallel programming formally. I have a greater appreciation for these topics now that I know why they do what they do.
That being said, I’m in my eighth and final semester of my undergrad. It doesn’t feel as weird as I thought it’d be. I have only two courses out of which one is a Pre-PhD course, now that our university has PhD students. I’m really enjoying the course, which is Parallel and Concurrent Programming. It’s definitely not as trivial as I thought it’d be and it’s making me think in many different directions.
I also am working on my Final Year Project, which is to detect Social Media BotNets on Reddit. Right now, the approach that my advising professor and I have come up with is novel with little to no work having been done. I’m working to completing it every day, bit by bit.
I’m attempting to build a mini Raspberry Pi 4 Cluster to test and play around with distributed computing. I’ve bought 4 Raspberry Pi 4Bs each with 2GB of RAM and a 16GB MicroSD Card. I also purchased 4 Power-over-Ethernet hats in order to eliminate the power cable and for better cable management. To power these Pis, I have a 8 port TP-Link switch with 4 ports supporting PoE. All I’m waiting for now is a custom 3D-Printed case being made & sent by my friend in a few days so that I can start some playing around (I don’t want to do it without the case in the event that I accidentally touch one of the transformers on the PoE hat). I plan to do some preliminary tests such as first check for the 100,000 primes or calculate the value of pi. After that, I plan to experiment with MPI + OpenMP to achieve minimum messages and using all cores on each node to see how far I can push it. I hope to work on underlying message passing protocol to see if I can tweak it a bit better.
I haven’t been all too well for the past few months and it’s made me introspect and retrospect quite a lot. I’ll be better hopefully in a few more months and am planning to change my lifestyle to be overall healthier.