I have to write up these trips for my work, so why not post here too?
Part 1 written Tuesday Jan 4:
Dale Haidvogel invited me to help him teach a ten-day ROMS training
in Hong Kong. He had said he would go early with his family, so Rob
and I bought tickets to arrive early. Dale’s family then changed
their minds and they spent New Year’s in Toronto. We arrived late
afternoon on Dec 30 for a class starting Jan 5. We were met by a
taxi driver with a card holding my name – it was so nice. Gan and
two of his students met us at the apartment where they are putting
us up.
The next morning one of the students, LinLin, came and gave us a
campus tour. HKUST has most everything in one enormous building,
with eating establishments on the lower levels, class rooms on the
main level, and offices above. HKUST is only twenty years old, but
has become one of the best universities in Hong Kong, with the top
business school in all of Asia. LinLin took us to meet Gan, then
we went to visit the computer lab where my part of the class will
be held. The two computer guys who run all the computers in the
Math department were there, explaining that the PCs running windows
would have a virtual Linux, then they could connect to Gan’s cluster
for doing the actual work. Seemed dicey to me, plus Gan hadn’t sent
them the list of software I’d asked for (with all the Python modules),
so that was worrisome as well. We agreed to meet with them again
on Tuesday, the day before the class started. Gan then took us out
for a big dim sum lunch.
That afternoon Rob and I went to Hang Hau to buy Octopus cards and
to look for an extra electric plug converter. The Octopus cards can
be loaded with money, then debitted by the buses and the metro, so
you don’t have to carry tons of change around. My last Seattle trip
was filled with scrambling for bus money.
We spent the evenings and some early mornings working on talks while
touring around during the daylight hours. We got out to Tsuen Wan
on Saturday to see a Taoist temple, then to Stanley Market to see
what was there (I wanted a Chinese chop and we were told that was
the place to go). On Sunday we went out by the airport to see the
largest Buddha in the world at the Po Lin monastery . You can get
there by aerial tramway, which happened to have a two hour wait –
we’d have taken a bus if we’d known! Gan told us there were many
tourists from the mainland over for the holidays and said it should
be quiet now until Chinese New Years.
Dale arrived on Monday the 3rd and we met him, Gan, and Olivia for
lunch. We talked over some of the plans and they told us that 40% of
those signed up are university students, maybe 40% already have some
ROMS experience and want more of the theory (Dale’s part of the
class) and some have absolutely no necessary skills other than
perhaps English, in spite of being told they should know math,
computers, oceanography before coming.
On Tuesday we met with the computer center guys again and were told
that Cook had found a way to get the PCs to run Linux, running one
image from a server. What a relief! Rob then handed over a DVD of
/usr/local on which he had installed everything we need. It’s going
to make everything so much simpler for the students. They can do
everything on the quad-core desktop systems rather than having to
log into Gan’s cluster.
Olivia is coordinating with a copy center and they want our talks
two days in advance for making copies for everyone. Dale and I are
both working hard to prepare things on time. Hernan is expecting me
to put all the talks on the ROMS Wiki, but I told him it has to
wait until the talks are all done. Classes start tomorrow!
Part 2: Fairbanks two weeks later:
Wow, that was one intense class! My talks are now on the wiki:
https://www.myroms.org/wiki/index.php/HK_2011
The first day wasn’t bad, with my part being an intro to Linux and
a tour of online ROMS resources. We had a nice group lunch with
everyone saying their name and where they are from, but I caught
practically none of it. There was a group from Korea, then a person
from Canada and one from Virginia, but I think the rest were Chinese.
Gan had opened up 35 spaces for people, reserving 5 for his group
since the lab has 40 workstations.
The second day we got into the thick of it. Dale had asked me to
make sure they’d be able to run five different test problems. Three
are in the main trunk of the ROMS code, two are not. One of the
latter contains a C language Bessel function for initial conditions
so I hacked the Makefile to link to that thing – but only for that
case. How to do that? Well, with git we have the technology. Download
ROMS with git-svn to a master branch, then create two other branches,
one for the circle problem, one for the user’s own changes. I wrote
down the commands to set that all up and asked the users to go
through them. I went way too fast and we were dealing with weird
Bessel problems for days afterwards.
In the evenings, Rob and I were working on the python tools for
ROMS, aka pyroms. They are still very rough around the edges, but
contain a surprising amount of useful capabilities. They do however
have a frightful list of dependencies which I never quite got working
on my Mac, so Rob set me up with a VirtualBox containing Linux with
the whole works. Fred at Rutgers sent me tips and codes and even a
patch to get me going. My pyroms talks were a bit scattered and
last minute, but by golly, we signed up for the Sunday outing and
were determined to make the most of it. Twenty-three of us got a
quick tour of the Hong Kong highlights, from a reunification park,
to the Peak, to the south side of the island (lunch at Aberdeen,
Repulse Bay, and Stanley), then back to Kowloon for the Hollywood
Parade of Stars.
On Tuesday afternoon I went through setting up a grid in pyroms,
then copying an existing case in ROMS, then modifying that to work
with the new grid. I changed the open boundary from the east side to
the south side and showed them several ways to screw up and get no
flow at all. They then repeated the getting no flow part and
expected me to fix them up. Hence the Thursday slide about becoming
a detective.
On Wednesday afternoon I gave the talks about MPI and fish, but they
really wanted to see the setting up of a 3-D problem, so that’s what
we did on Thursday afternoon. We added tides from Oregon State, with
caveats about the 18.6 year components not being included, then we
added initial conditions from SODA, finally we added atmospheric
forcing which Rob had prepared for me. I showed them recompiling
umpteen times and mentioned that not everyone has the personality
for it. We finished with ROMS seg faulting on reading in one of
those files. So very true to life!
On Friday the morning was a Q&A session with Dale, Gan and I taking
turns answering the questions. Lots and lots of good questions. That
afternoon we were all ready to call it a day, except Rob volunteered
to lead a class on getting VirtualBox going on their laptops with
all the pyroms goodies – it took all afternoon!
The students were very involved, staying in the lab until we had to
throw them out at 5:30 every evening, even on the Saturday. There
were always many questions, though about half the students were
totally silent the whole time. I was asked to slow down, even when
I thought I was using my slow voice for foreigners – it wasn’t slow
enough, especially the hands-on parts. The Koreans invited us to
come visit them – perhaps in the fall. One is a former student of
Dale’s, now a professor (BJ), and two are researchers at KORDI, one
wanting a coupled ROMS-WRF model. It was good to see BJ and he did a
great job of asking the questions he thought his people would want
to hear the answers to. Gan told us half a dozen times some students
are looking for a quick model to learn, a black box where you hit a
button to make it go. Those students were disappointed, but I think
it was overall a positive experience. Gan was very impressed with
what Rob could contribute to the lab portion, answering many
questions, including those about setting stuff up on their home
computers.
Gan told us the idea for this training came about when he visits China
and gets bombarded with ROMS questions of all sorts, to the point where
he can’t get to the coffee during breaks. Now he can tell them all they
should have come to the class! If we do it again, it should be easier with
so much material already prepared. Gan says he started a competition between
his students for who can master git first.
P.S. I finally have a better understanding of build.bash, how and why
one would use it. I do feel that it’s unfortunate that it is not
a thing of mean, lean, clean beauty.