Flashes of Panic

I have three distinct and non-overlapping problems projects on my plate for MPOW.

One of them actually requires me to be in a specific place and working on a specific box, since the project is working with a cloud of Perl scripts providing a web interface (via IIS on Windows, to my horror,) to an expensively-licensed piece of bioinformatics software. Like listening to a person with a strong accent, I’m finding that the longer I pore over this Perl, the more I actually become able to answer my own questions about what it’s doing. The question is whether I can climb the learning curve fast enough to satisfy (a) MPOW, and (b) the specific client. The fact that I’m beginning to come up with possibly-intelligent questions about how the software works all on my own is encouraging.

On another project, I crashed Tomcat hard on Tuesday, and haven’t been able to bring it back up. Thankfully, this is at the bottom of my priority stack.

The third one has to do with compiling LAM-MPI libraries for a particular set of compilers on the research cluster. I’m actually most interested in this one; I’m supposed to be getting 7.0.6 functional, but 7.1.1 “might come in handy,” and I’m thinking of trying OpenMPI 1.0.1 just for icing if it turns out that I actually can figure out what I’m doing. I’m really having a good time figuring out what makes the cluster tick, and I’m glad I dropped the (required) Theory course to grab the Parallel Computing special topics while it’s being offered.

Now Playing: Baby That’s Not All from Hello Starling by Josh Ritter