To Song: I was aware of that but I didn’t list it as an option, because I am more used to vim than emacs.. but maybe I should give Emacs a try again, esp. with the viper mode for vim people. Thanks for the reminder!

disk io is an oooooooooooold topic of os. most os already has a lot of buffer/cache mechanism built in. it’ll take a lot of effort to recreate those things in your application. but one advantage is that you don’t have to worry about cache miss and you can tune things yourself.

when simulation gets big, usually you want to parallels it. many people uses openmp, but it’s too general. parsec(http://www.parsec.org/) is a great message passing simulation framework that can make parallel simulation much easier. the prof. behind it got a lot of funding and rolled out a company with the help of it.

I’m in the process of applying to grad schools, and if you don’t mind, I would have one question.
What did you talk about in the “Personal History Statement” (required UC Berkeley)? They say it should be more about ‘one’s life’ and not identical to the statement of purpose. But I feel those things are already included somewhat in my SOP . (And I don’t want to start saying how I love computer science and mathematics since grade 4 or something like that…)

Thanks

i guess a lot of stuff in Marxism is right. except for the realization of communism…