I came back from the
Evergrow Workshop in
Jerusalem this Saturday at about 13:00. It was a very instructive workshop where we learned how to use the resources of
Everlab, a cluster of computers scattered along universities mostly in Europe and with the central administration in the
School of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Jerusalem (
HUJI).
The notorious participants were physicists
Nicolas Sourlas, the first one to point out the link between
Statistical Physics and
Error-correcting codes (see
cond-mat/9811406 for a short overview), and
Scott Kirkpatrick, the pioneer of replicas and
spin-glasses (you can find a good introduction with all the relevant papers, include the one from Kirkpatrick, within the book
Spin Glass Theory and Beyond), by
Mezard,
Parisi and Virasoro). Kirkpatrick is the project manager working at HUJI. The organization of the workshop was due to
Danny Bickson and
Elliot Jaffe, two local researchers responsible for the Everlab and the
Condor implementation at it, another resource that can be used by the
Evergrow project to run programs in different computers. The importatnt feature of Everlab and Condor is that anyone in a computer inside a member institution of the project can use the resources of comuters in any member cluster, such that me, here in
Aston, can use the computers at Rome (which is not a good example as they are always running at their limit) to run my programs if they are free.
Apart from this, we also have presentations of the members describing how they use or plan to use these resources. An also interesting presentation was of the people from the
DIMES project. This project aims to create a map of the internet and relies on
distributed computation in the same sense as in the
SETI@home project, to do so. If you are interested in helping these guys, what I recommend a lot, you can
download the freeware that will consume very little resource from your computer and you will have access to some of their data.
About the city, Jerusalem is a very sunny city, without a single cloud in the sky in all the five days I stayed there. It seems a very secure place with respect to crime, I didn't see any trouble and really felt safe even at night. The strange thing although is that wherever you go in the city you will find young people of about 18 years with rifles and machine guns. They told me later that it's because every young in
Israel needs to serve the army and they are responsible for their guns even when they are not at the base, so they have to carry then everywhere in order to avoid that they end up in the wrong hands.
I visited the
old city, the impressive walled old Jerusalem where there is the
Church of the Holy Sepulcre, the alledged place where Jesus is buried, and where is the famous
Wailing Wall. The markets inside the city makes you feel like you're in an arab movie. I took photos, but I cannot put them here because I didn't manage to put them on my computer yet.. :o
I also visited the
Museum of Israel, the home of the
Dead Sea Scrolls. They're well accomodated in a building named the
Shrine of the Book. The Museum also has a beautiful collection of old artifacts that date back thousands of years. I just had one day to see everything, but it would take more than it to fully aprecciate all the collection.
The campus of the University of Israel has a curious name for me. It's called
Edmond Safra and it brought memories of the time when I worked in Brazil for Edmond's brother
Joseph Safra in the
Safra Bank. A rich family as you can imagine.
In the end, the only bad part of the travel is when you leave the country. In the
Ben-Gurion Airport, the only international airport of Israel, you have to pass a very strict security check where the guy asked me to show him the photos I took, to explain him how was the workshop, to describe all the places I visited and even to explain to him what physics has to do with Internet. Well I thought in sayint to him to look at my blog to see the answer to this last question, but it would be a long journey back to UK and I didn't want to spend a lot more time answering security questions.
Picture: sight of the wall of the Old City of Jerusalem, by Danny Bickson
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Edited: 21-June-2006 
