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No one would have thought this could happen but these results prove it. Scotland beat England in the rugby 6 nations cup. They were playing last night at Murrayfield stadium in Edinburgh.

After the amazing victory against the English the whole town was packed with rugby fans wearing kilts, singing, drinking, and having a good time.

Walking down Princess Street was a funny adventure. One could experience first hand impressions of “scottish pride” – all I can say is yuppiee ‘we’ beat the english.

Semester break in England is from the 11.-18. of February and thus Christina came up here to Edinburgh to visit me and see a little bit of Scotland. This time we even had more luck with the weather :). As usual we made some very nice pictures.

We went to see Glasgow for a day. It was a nice trip and we have seen the most intersting parts of town.

The day before our Glasgow trip we went to the Ocean Terminal shopping center in Leith where the Royal Yacht Britannia is located.

On Wednesday we made a day trip to Pitlochry where the picture with the waterfall was taken. We also went to a Whiskey Distillery and made a very interesting tour there. I am now a whisky expert! Since Pitlochry is also known for its nice walks we made the Edradour tour where we saw a beautiful waterfal and some very nice scenery.

We also went to see the Edinburgh Castle. I still had some vouchers so we could go in for free. There are 2 museums in the castle and the view over Edinburgh is just terrific.

I also finally had the chance to go to the Doctor’s Pub with Christina. A place where Christian (hello to Switzerland) and I went to eat the famous Ben Nevis Burger :). Well, the week went by quickly and Christina had to go back to London because school started again and I had to get busy with university again. But it was a very nice and exciting week!

Soon after I turn older it is also Christinas turn to catch up with me. Of course one of my presents was that I came down for a visit and we had a lot of fun indeed! We made a little party where pizza bread and a delicious self made Sachertorte were served, and believe me, the cake was gone instantly! Afterwards we went out in a club and danced until the officiall closing time. It was great fun :)

Finally there is the chance to dive into another paradigm of programming, namely functional programming. Somehow a little bit neglected at the JKU, it is standard practice over here at the Edinburgh University. Maybe the reason for this is that Philip Wadler, the inventor of the Haskell functional programming language is a Professor at UoE.

But I think that the true reason for this is the beauty of functional programming languages. Surely not every problem can be easily solved with functional programming but for the areas I have seen so far, it seems to be a very elegant and succinct approach!

So far I was able to stick my nose into Haskell and OCaml. The nice thing about functional languages is that once you have understood the underlying concepts, it is very easy to learn a “new” functional programming language. Much easier than it is to learn a new imperative language.

Finally there is this funny quizz where you are asked to distinguish between a programming language inventor and a serial killer. Try it out, it is really funny!

Well it was again the time of the year where that certain day arrives when you get older. For me, this happens on the 14th of January. It was a very nice day! In the morning we (Christina and I) had a real british breakfast and then we went to the sea since the weather was really nice. Afterwards we went shopping in order to prepare the birthday gig later on in the day.

We all had a very good time as you can tell by looking at the pictures in the gallery.

Before flying home to Austria, I went to London to spend a couple of days with Christina. Since I have already travelled by train from Edinburgh to London, I was tempted to try other cheap means of transportation. This turned out to be a bad idea. I took the bus from Edinburgh to Glasgow and then from Glasgow to London via Manchaster. The bus trip to Glasgow was totally fine on a regular coach, but the 8 and a half our trip from Glasgow to London was horrible! Travelling in a double decker crammed with people and the heater turned up way too much was not a very nice experience. But it get’s better!

The last week in Edinburgh before my return to London followed by a flight home over the Christams holidays was very exciting. Many exchange students who were here only for the semester were having farewell parties. Thus the nightlife was quite exhaustive. But before going out at night we always made sure that our bellies are full by having a cookout either at my place at Roberstons Close or at Christians Flat.

In my last post I have written a little bit about Thread Level Parallelism and since SUN has officially released its first processor based on TLP I thought this is a good opportunity to write a little something about this nice processor.

Instead of increasing the size of the pipeline by dividing pipeline stages up into smaller units in order to be able to increase the processor tact rate and then fail to keep the pipeline full (as Intel has done it with the P4), SUN did something different. They concentrated on throughput and went away from the classical ILP paradigm.

Their new processor consists of up to 8 cores processing 4 threads per core. So this means that 32 threads can be processed “simultaneously”. Each core can process one instruction every cycle. There is a L1 cache per core and a shared L2 cache. In order to provide the high memory bandwidth necessary to “feed” 32 threads, a crossbar interconnects scheme routes memory references to a banked on-chip level-2 cache that all threads share. All this means more throughput, less energy consumption and more efficient usage of resources.

Are you still reading this post and still interested? Then you should check out this description of the niagara architecture.

Prof. John Hennessy, erstwhile Director of the Computer System Laboratory, now President of Stanford University, visited the University of Edinburgh to receive a Honorary Degree and give a public lecture on the Future of Microprocessor Architecture.

The lecture was very well structured and thrilling, especially the part about Thread Level Parallelism and a preview of SUNs upcoming Niagara Architecture. After having spent quite some time with a famous book written by Prof. Hennesy, namely Computer Architecture: A quantitative approach, I was really anxious to see this talk.

Prof. Hennessy led the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) team at Stanford in the early 1980s and was a cofounder, in 1984, of MIPS Computer Systems, now MIPS Technologies. He is a recipient of the 2000 John Von Neumann Medal, the 2000 ASEE R. Lamme Medal, the 2001 Eckert Mauchly Award and the 2001 Seymour Cray Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

So all in all this guy has done quite some stuff for computer science!

The day before my return to Edinburgh Christina and I went to see Jakob, Bernie and Deep , three friends from home who also spend a semester abroad, namely in Oxford at Oxford Brooks University. After having some trouble finding out how to get there, we finally found the bus station in London where the Oxford Tube would pick us up and transport us to Gipsy Lane Campus in Oxford. Shortly after our arrival Jakob picked us up and showed us the way to their university dorms. Afterwards we got a guided tour by Jakob and Bernie through Oxford. Even though it was already a little dark, it was very interesting.

Then we were invited to have dinner prepared by our gourmet chef Bernie. The meal was delicious and we had a very very good time and a lot of fun! Of course there are also many fotos and even videos from this event.