Sea Day: Yokohama

Today is "Sea Day" (海の日), a national holiday in Japan to emphasize the importance of the sea to Japan (remember that Japan is an island country). So I decided to use this chance to explore more of Japan and go to Yokohama, which is next to the sea (no beaches, unfortunately).

From Tsukuba to Yokohama on Google Maps

Note that I went to the Minatomirai station and not the Yokohama station, since Yokohama station is more or less a business district than a tourist attraction. When I got there, I immediately looked for the sea and took a picture!

Not what most people would expect when talking
about the sea, but it's the sea nevertheless.

Next, I went to have lunch. I left Tsukuba at 9.10 am and the trip took around an hour and a half. Add a bit of time wondering around Minatomirai and it's now time for lunch. However...

Every single shop has a long queue. It seems like there's a lot of people who came here (though I'm not sure what all of them came for, since I didn't really see that much people at the attractions). In the end, I've settled for convenience store lunch (which, for the record, also had a long line).

Remember the landscape picture I've posted up there? My friends on Facebook saw the Ferris Wheel and wanted me to go up there. So I figured "it's only ¥700, why not?" Here's some of the views from up there.

Next, I went to the Cup Noodles museum, showcasing the history of the invention of Cup Noodles. The entrance fee is ¥500, with additional fees for activities if you want to join (mostly for kids). Did you know that Nissin is the original company for instant noodles and that it was invented by one person, Momofuku Ando?

Me and Cup Noodles-kun

Showcasing the different packages of Cup Noodle.
(This is only a small part.) 

Instant Ramen for astronautical use

Make your own Cup Noodles workshop

Cup Noodles playground

After that is done, I went to the Osanbashi pier (great view!) and stopped by the China town before returning to Tsukuba.

Walking up the pier

Ocean Dream, a ship docked at the pier

On top of the pier

The China town at Yokohama

Tsukuba, Science City (Part Deux) and a bus ride

Today is the first day of a 3-days weekend. (Monday is "Sea Day".) I've decided to continue my exploration of Tsukuba "Science City" by visiting the two other places in my itinerary: AIST's Geological Museum and KEK Communication Plaza.

The first place I've visited is the Geological Museum, which is located to the Tsukuba Science Center I went to last time.

One thing I can say is that "there's a lot of rocks here!" I'm not really interested in rocks, so let's just move on to the pictures.

The ceiling is a map of Japan marked with major earthquakes.

Some beautiful rocks!

More rocks

And more rocks

The evolution of Human

The periodic table... with real rocks

The screen resolution is really frightening!

Outdoor rock exhibit

Some stamp for touring activities (?)

Let's move on to the next place, KEK. KEK stands for "Kou Enerugi kasokuki Kenkyuu kikou" which means "High Energy Accelerator Research Organization". At KEK, they have physical accelerators which are used to attempt to understand the origin of the universe.

But first, I have to get to KEK first! KEK is not really reachable by bicycle since it's quite far, so I had to take the bus. This is the first time I've took a local bus in Japan, so I'll write about it a bit. The bus I took was ran by "TsukuBus"

Getting on the bus at Tsukuba Center

The exit is in the front, with a payment machine and a coin exchange machine.

The display shows the next station and the fee based on where you got on

If you got on at the terminal, you won't get a ticket. But if you got on somewhere else, you will get a ticket which will allow you to pay the lower price.

Press the button to get down at the next station.

And finally, I've reached KEK!

First, I've got a visitor badge from the guard and was directed to the communication plaza (public display).

There, I got an English "guide pen". By tapping the pen to a specific place on the guide book (it was overlaid with a dotted pattern for use with optical scanning), it will play an audio file associated with the exhibit.

Next, let's look at the exhibits.

Weak force and strong force. I've heard about them many times but I still don't know what they are.

"Wonder Quarks" allows me to interact with (kick around) particles in a simulation.

A model of an accelerator

Anyone remember J. J. Thomson from their chemistry class?

Measuring ambient cosmic rays

There are also other displays, but the ones I've shown here were the interesting ones. This visit to KEK led me to one conclusion, "Physics is interesting, unless you're in Physics class".

And it's time to go back to Tsukuba Center!

Sakura-kan

It's a bit late, but today, I'm going to give a quick review of my room at Sakura-kan. Sakura-kan is a hotel-like guest house for short-term visitors at AIST and a room can only be booked via a host researcher. Three types of rooms are offered: single, twin and family. Family room contains a kitchen, but tenants of other types of room may use the common kitchen.

So let's look at the room.

This is a newly made bed. Cleaning service is provided twice a week.

A chair and a table, which I've never used.

The entrance. To the left is the toilet and to the right is the closet.

Inside the closet, a "clothes lines" is available for drying clothes.
(Though the humidity makes it quite hard for clothes to dry.)

Inside the bathroom

A normal toilet

The working desk I'm typing this on. The telephone provides both
internal and external dialing (charges applies)

The television. Channels are NHK G, NHK E, Chiba TV,  Nippon TV,
TV Asahi, TBS, TV Tokyo, Fuji TV and ACCS

An iron may be borrowed from the front counter

And next is the laundry room. Both washing machines and dryers are available free of charge, but detergent is not provided.

A post about work

It's been a while since I've last posted about work, so it's about time I post an update on what I spend most of my days playing with.

Last time, I've mentioned that I was working on porting postcopy migration to libvirt and CloudStack. After hunting down several bugs, I've successfully done that, more or less. But because the code for it is still in development, my port was more for testing and proof-of-concept than for actual use. Also, I don't think the user should have to be concerned about the method of migration in use.

"What is this box? Should I tick or not tick?" - User 

Right now, I'm playing with RDMA Migration, which utilizes the RDMA protocol rather than the TCP. RDMA stands for Remote Direct Memory Access and allows one computer to access another's memory directly without going through the CPU. RDMA works over Infiniband or RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), which is more or less a special flavor of Ethernet with additional features. The driver for the Mellanox ConnectX-2 that I've used supports RoCE and basically allowed the Ethernet device to appear as an Infiniband device. The lesson to take home is: in this world, there are protocols other than TCP/IP and Ethernet.

Of course, when testing migration methods, one thing that cannot be left out is benchmarking. Having spent quite a bit of time benchmarking, here's a lesson I've learnt: always automate. Automation will make your live much easier and your benchmarks much more reproducible. Plus, you can rest a bit while your automated benchmark is running.

This is it for now. The next work-related post will be about my summer internship presentation to other people in the department.