NASA LARSS 2008: The Sillies

Originally written on June 27-July 26, 2008

June 27, 2008:

"System is currently experiencing extreme amounts of boredom. Please check back later."

After spending 4 hours thinking up and typing up super-long journal entries, going to lunch, and going to the Conference Center to turn in forms, I was hoping that at least ONE of my eight polarizability calculations would be finished by the time I came back.

Guess what?

None of them finished. Yet.

Basically, the only reason why I'm still here writing things is to keep me from going on different websites and coming across another accidental restricted site. And I'm also taking a break from reading Wikipedia articles. And I've also run out of academic papers to read. I don't want to start looking for academic papers to read, because I don't know what'll happen to me if I did... I could end up coming home not being able to speak normal English for a while... I would end up speaking in some strange, computational-termed variant of English, peppered with Chemistry terms, basis sets, or computational methods...

Alternatively, I COULD try reading more Wikipedia articles, but I've already read most of the interesting ones (e.g. Space shuttles and orbiters, articles on the Challenger and Columbia disasters, articles on the gas giant planets, their moons, and the origins of their names, etc.). I've also been so bored that I've read through articles on Windows XP and Vista, as well as articles on older systems, their codenames, and other related stuff... and I've read up on MS-DOS, Blue Screens of Death, video game consoles, iPods, and even scarier... how hard drives work, and the best programs to use for backing up data, and how to properly install and uninstall drivers without breaking the computer...

Someone please give me more interesting things to read... Please...

Or give me something else to do while these calculations are running. The waiting is starting to drive me nuts...

And something else I forgot to mention - my mentor isn't here this week. He's at a conference in Las Vegas until next week, so all I've had to do this week was run the calculations and hope they finish...

... hehe... I just realized something hilarious... the name of the computer I'm logging into to run my calculations is called "sooner" ... And yet the calculations running on it aren't getting done any sooner... lol... haha...

AAAARGH!!!!

I can think of only two things other than reading random things that will help:

1. Figure out how to get the calculations to run in parallel - meaning that they use more than one processor to perform calculations, and thus finish faster. We've tried all last week to get them to run this way, but it didn't seem to work...

2. Start on the secondary project that my mentor mentioned during the first or second week - dealing with silicon carbide ceramic materials. It involves a lot of lab work, and it's the primary project for another student, so I'd be assisting. However, we haven't yet heard from the project leader about when training for the lab work will happen, or when I can join in, so... *sigh*

Maybe I could open up one of those other books on my desk - the one for Python - and teach myself some programming...

Maybe I'll do one of those next week, if by some awful chance the calculations are still running when I come back.

July 3, 2008

I just HAD to mention this... it's so hilarious that it's not! (and I'm well aware that this statement makes no understandable sense... hehehe...)

Setting: Work (as usual)
Current Activity: Waiting for calculations to finish (as usual)

And...

Current CPU Job Time = 14542 min. = 242.37 hours = approximately 10 days

...

Ten days?!

That has to be a record.

In case you're wondering, yes, those are the calculations I started on Monday of last week. And now it's Thursday of the next week, right before the Fourth of July weekend. And they show no signs of stopping anytime soon.

... Let's just hope they finish by next week, or else we're in trouble... (e.g. after they pass a certain number of cycles, they mess up, and the polarizabilities won't get calculated. Not good. At all.)

*sigh*

Oh, well. I refuse to worry about this until next Monday. It's an extended weekend, after all - no work tomorrow!

July 7, 2008:

Something rather out of the ordinary happened when I arrived at work today and entered the room...

I was hit by a blast of... VERY HOT AIR!!!

In a room that's usually colder than Antarctica on most days.

What happened?!

Apparently the air conditioning broke over the weekend, and all of the computers that were on just aggravated it more. It's gotten so hot in the room that the floor tiles were buckling!! It's gotten a little cooler now, after about 2 hours, but at the time, it was so unbearably hot that I couldn't get any work done! And because of this... If only I didn't have a required luncheon to go to today, I would have just gone straight home without having to make up the time - it was the air conditioner's fault that it broke!

So this ended up in me walking all over the place trying to find a computer lab or a spare computer. The Technical Library didn't have one, and there didn't seem to be any empty, usable computers in sight elsewhere in the Processing Lab building. If only I knew this was going to happen today, I would have brought my laptop and used an X-term emulator to check my jobs!

After that, I just decided to come back to my room to see if any tech people had come to fix the AC. No one showed up, but the room WAS several degrees cooler - not Antarctica-cold, but bearable to stay in for more than 5 minutes at a time!

So, now it's back to business - waiting.... and waiting.... and waiting!!

In unrelated news, my fears were confirmed - one of the 10-day calculation jobs actually finished... but it didn't FINISH. After 13 days, the CP-SCF that had to run before polarization calculations did not converge. Crap. We're going to look at that sometime soon, after the temperature's completely normalized... Until then... *gulp* let's just hope the others don't screw up as well...

That's all for now. Hopefully it gets cooler in here soon!

July 26, 2008:

GAMESS is annoying.

Trying to run polarizability calculations on GAMESS is a nightmare.

I'm a week behind on my calculations, just because the stupid program crashes every time I try to run a job! For stupid reasons like convergence problems, memory limits, and... (I just LOVE this)... NO FREE DISK SPACE!!

*maniacal laughter*

Ahem.

So, yeah... I don't like the program. I was fine with Gaussian, ORCA, and Ecce/NWChem, but GAMESS... *sigh*

I have only 2 more weeks to go until the end of my internship. Will I get ANY good results by then?