Hi all,

it has been some time ago since I last wrote something, and I have the usual excuse for it. Busy, busy busy. So what have I been up to since my last message.

First of all I had a visitor from The Netherlands. Bram came by for the weekend to visit me and see Geneve. My first visitor. yay! Really cool. I showed him almost all of Geneve until our feet told us to stop walking and start sitting. We walked by the lake towards the United Nations building, from there to the train station where we ate something at a terrace nearby (across the Payot book store where I of course ended up buying a book….sigh). Then we headed for the old part to see the cathedral where we went up to the top. And afterwards I showed him Parc Bastions with the reformation statues. (Yay, William of Orange).
The second day I took him to Carouge (according to me the nicest part of GE) and we went up to the Saleve. Using the telepherique of course. On top we saw some para-gliders jumping off which was an impressive sight. And in the evening we went to see “The Number 23″ with Jim Carrey, after which Bram found all kinds of 23′s in his life and none in mine…. I didn’t sleep well that night.

The days afterwards I finished an EU proposal I have been working on (together with Dimitris and Alessandro) and we submitted it just before the deadline. Let’s see what is going to happen with that proposal. The most exciting one for me though is the Microsoft proposal. If I’m not mistaken I will get the news on that one on the 1st of July. (me nervous).

Two weeks ago I received my new system at work. A nice Intel Core2 CPU, 2.4 GHz, 2GB of RAM and a excellent nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX GPU. I needed it to work on some physical simulations we want to do with the GPU. After some initial tests I have to say that I’m quite impressed with the card. Both in graphics processing terms as well as CUDA. I’m currently writing some base libraries that I will need in my further development, so I have nothing really interesting to show just yet. But as soon as I have some nice pictures/stats/movies I will post them here.

I’m also dabbling a bit with SSE, which is quite interesting to do. I might use this to benchmark against some of my CUDA/GPU implementations. Would def be interesting, but I have to learn a lot more to know for sure that I get the most out of both paths. Nothing is more stupid than benchmarking against bad implementations.

I wish I could tell you about my PhD topic, but since it’s not fixed yet (depends on the MS scholarship or EU projects) I don’t want to jinx it. I can say though that it’s a really interesting subject and unlike any other subject previously tackled at MIRALab.

I’ll keep you all up to date.