During the summers of 2017 I interned with Prof. Geoffrey Fox and Prof. Judy Qiu at the Indiana University Bloomington. Like most of the other students in my college I got this this intern via apping(sending applications to multiple people). Since my interest and experience in the field(distributed systems) were relavant, this was the right intern for me. Unlike the usual 10-12 weeks research internship I was here only for 6 weeks. So less time and more work. My intern was well funded and accomodation was pre-arranged by the university staff. US visa has a very long and tedious procedure. I was lucky enough that it did not get into the administrative processing and received it quite close to my departure date.

The engineering department at IU consists of very few departments such as Cyber Infrastructure and Intelligent Systems. I was working with the Intelligent Systems Engineering Department which is relatively new in the university. But looking at the research in Computer Security and High Performance Computing the university does very well with the ranking (source: http://csrankings.org/). It has some very cool faculty doing very intersting work.

I was working on a tool called Harp which is used for confluence of High Performance Computing and Distributed Systems. The basic idea was to use the strengths of the two domains and make the Machine Learning algorithms run faster and efficient. More about Harp can be found here. I was using the Intel’s data analytics library DAAL and Harp’s collective communication to implement the ML algoriths in a distributed manner. Since, we know that Hadoop is one of the best tool for storage and processing of large distributed data, all this was implemented as a plugin for Hadoop.

Bloomington, not being a Tier 1 US city, does not come close to Chicago, New York, etc in terms of the glamour and sophistication but the city has its own charm which could not be seen in the “big cities”. For anyone coming to US for the first time this place would seem to be huge. Everything right from cars, houses, roads, malls are really big. It’s really beautiful; campus, weather, people, everything. People here are very polite and humble. You should not be surprised if someone just on the way stops to have a little conversation with the “new person in town”. Being a university town it had people from all over the world. The diversity is really huge. Meeting people from different parts of the world is a great learning experience. I got a chance to meet people from Brazil, Russia, China, Uganda, Mexico, Cananda, Pakistan, Afganistan, Romania and obviously a lot of Indians.

Weather is really good with occasional rainfalls and the temperature is generally in the range of 20-25 degree Celsius for this time of the year. It gets moderately humid here sometimes due to the rainfall followed by sudden sunlight. The cleanliness and low-pollution levels of the place can be clearly judged from the vivid blue color of sky and the fresh cool air. One of the strange thing I experienced there is that the sun sets at 9:30PM or so. I also spent the Summer solstice day(21 June 2017) and hence was the longest day of my life yet. The days are literally very long and so the night-life also starts late.

Talking about night-life here, it is quite a charm. It is pretty much safe here to roam around at three in the morning provided you stay close to the university campus. Going downtown on the Kirkwood Avenue would let you pass through several bars and pubs with some great eating spots. These places might or might not have nominal cover charges depending on if there is some performance going on inside. The Players pub, Root Cellar, and Backdoor were among my favorites having the perfect combination of dance, music and drinks. Kilroys, Video Saloon, Upstairs, Nicks, Buffalios were good too. All of these places knew how to make a good Long Island Iced Tea(LIIT) which became my favorite drink soon enough.

Since I was here for a very short time I did not get to explore a lot of places outside the main city. Although, I got to visit the Monoroe Lake on one of the weekend. It is a peaceful, relaxing fishing spot(if you can arrange a rod and bait). No adventure sports there though. Its just for some good photographs and stuff. I also visited Chicago for one of the weekends. Did the usual touristy things such as getting a picture on the Bean, visited the Arts Museum(didn’t like it very much though), visited various pubs, spent a long evening at the Navy Pier and enjoyed the Centennial wheel ride, swam in the Michigan Lake, went to the 360° Chicago Observation Deck, walked through the Michigan Avenue(saw the Trump Tower :P), enjoyed the Music Festival in the Millennium park, etc. It was a long and on the best weekends I spent in the USA.

As I type this sitting at the Abu Dabhi Airport, about to board my flight back home, I miss this magnificent summer in the United States and wait for the next phase of life i.e. stupid job.