New semester
Study desk
It’s that time of year. Holidays and New years is over, and your mind wanders into a vacation-like dream state. But in the back of your head, you know everything will soon return to normal. The start of the semester is when normality is restored. Wake up.
I’ve found a possible master thesis at Simula research laboratory within the field of interconnection networks, simulation and vizualisation. Visualisation of Network Simulation Traffic. When looking around for a possible thesis, I wanted to combine my knowledge and passion for the Java programming language, and combine it with the field of networking and high-performance servers. In the process learning new things and extend my knowledge. I’ve sent some mails saying that I’m interested and got some articles and books to read, which I found interesting and exciting. Especially when you think about what the present and future requires from high-performance computing and storage, for a broad spectrum of application areas.
Choosing a master thesis is not easy for many. For some it falls really easy, if they have a very small and specific personal interest within their field of science. For others it’s not too clear. Some think that they need extensive knowledge of the topics used in the master thesis to take it. Of course an healthy interest is important, but would a master thesis be any fun if you knew everything beforehand? It would be like doing a chore, not exploring or extending your existing knowledge. What advice I got, was to find what you are interested in, show interest in a research group that does research within that field and just go for it. One has to learn and fill the gaps anyways, the reason why we go to universities.
This semester I will be attending one course at the University of Oslo, and two at the research institute at Kjeller.
UNIK4280 - Performance analysis. Basic introduction to simulation, measurement methods, queue theory and stochastic systems (random). Not many attending the course, so it will be intimate, but I think it will be useful things to know.
UNIK4660 - Vizualisation of scientific data. Basic introduction to computer graphics and how to visualize scientific data using various algorithms. I dread the mathematics in this course, as I’ve not a strong mathematical background. I’ll just have to pick up and read extra about it. Very relevant for the possible master thesis. Looks like great fun to be had.
INF5050 - Protocols and routing in the internet. Covers basic topics within internetworking. Not very relevant for the master thesis as most of that happens on the link-layer and is an entirely different architecture. But handy knowledge and it looks like an interesting course.
As a side dish, I will be a teaching assistant in the master course, INF5750 - Open Source Software Development. It gives some extra cash and I’ll be able to help other students with tools and frameworks such as maven, subversion, eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, jUnit etc. Pretty trivial stuff when you’ve had some hands-on time with them, but still a learning curve. Except for Spring. I don’t if anyone knows the entire Spring framework, it’s very big.
To sum it up, it’ll be a busy semester!