Why do they talk about a genocide?

It was very frustrating to listen and see the lies some of the people are spreading around the world about a Tamil genocide. There is no problem to any Tamil in Sri Lanka.

(if I have money) I can personally bring anyone (of course non-terrorist) to Sri Lanka. Thre is no problem. Politically Tamils have more power than Sinhalese sometimes.

So it is worthwhile to look at why these people are lying like this. If we look at the background of this people it is not that hard to find the reason. All the people who talk about a genocide and protest in washington, DC, Canada or UK are now not living in SL. Non of the Tamils now in Sri Lanka are talks about this genocide, coz they know its not happening.

Then why are these people outside of SL talking about this? Its easy. Take a look at the conditions to be satisfied to get in to refugee status.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defines a "refugee" as "a person who has fled his/her country of nationality (or habitual residence) and who is unable or unwilling to return to that country because of a "well-founded" fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group."
But it excludes "those who have left their homes only to seek a more prosperous life."

Clearly this is the reason. They came out of Sri Lanka, obviously to seek for a more prosperous life. Most of the South Asians will try to go out of their country to Europe or N. America for this reason. But its hard to get in to these countries, if you don't have proper qualifications. The easiest way is becoming a refugee or political asylum.

Complaining about genocide is the easiest way to claim "fear of persecution based on race, nationality". Here we go. When LTTE was there, they were telling this because anyway LTTE was killing tamils and making the lives of those people miserable. Now when that is gone, they need a different reason to stay in their countries. So the new "mantra" is Tamil genocide in SL by SL government.

Very small percentage these people can easily use "fear of persecution based on membership in a particular social group", because this small percentage is LTTE henchmen. But unfortunately for them most of the countries banned LTTE as a terrorist organization. So they can't use it. Their savior is "Genocide Mantra".

Come on, even now how are you paying monthky as bribes to all LTTE henchmen within the country you are living. How many have rejected and what happened to them? 

Why are these[1, 2] henchmen, trying to prove LTTE leader is alive? Look at what all the tamils have contributed so far and how much do you think they have in the bank? Do you think those henchmen like to give up their free and luxurious life, that they enjoy using your money? Forget it. 

Please don't blame Sri Lanka for your own goodness. Let us build our small country. We've been suffering for more than 30 years. SL natives, born outside SL, and has never been to SL, please just come once and see how good SL is.

If Sinhalese are killing tamils, think about these.
1. How many tamil ministers are in SL cabinet and how many tamils MPs are in parliament right now?
2. Is there any place in Sri Lanka that a Tamil can not go? But during LTTE days, there were lots of places a Sinhalese or a Muslim couldn't go.
3. Colombo is the commercial capital of Sri Lanka. How many Tamils are living in suburbs of Colombo (Wellawatta, Kotahena, Mattakkuliya, Kirulapone, Fort area, etc.,) ?

These are only few questions.

Its ok if you can not come back to Sri Lanka. Everyone likes a good life. But please don't blame the country for that.

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Sri Lanka - A Land Like No Other

Now the war is over and Sri Lanka is a completely safe country for anyone and everyone in the world.

When I was in school, everywhere in all the books it was mentioned that Sri Lanka is a beautiful country. But not seeing or being to any other country, I didn't know how beautiful it is. Now having gone to different places, outside Sri Lanka, I think I know how beautiful it is.

Everywhere it is green. Lots of waterfalls, trees, mountains, fantastic beaches, friendly people (completely opposite of Newyorkers ;) ), wild life, flora and fauna. Yes now I know how beautiful it is. When people ask about Sri Lanka, I used to explain about all these. But when they asked about war, I was shaky. Now things are different, war is over. No terrorists to be afraid of. Just one nation united under the one flag with Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. Sri Lanka is one of the best and safest places to visit on this earth.

Look at this video I posted sometime back and see for yourself. So when you plan your next vacation, include Sri Lanka.
And oh, my Sri Lankan native Tamil friends who never visited Sri Lanka. Stop protesting in all these junctions in US, Canada and Europe. Now its the time, go and visit your beautiful country with your friends.

(Oh yes, I will be there as soon as I get money to buy three tickets :D )

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Clouds vs (Scientific Computing, HPC and MPI)

Cloud computing seems to have a bad reputation among the HPC community. May be because most of the computer scientists who comment about this are from grid computing and MPI backgrounds, they are still skeptical about clouds.

It is important to note that HPC applications, which require parallel processing algorithms and software, are only a subset of problems within scientific application. Even within HPC, MPI* (see note below) is just one pattern of doing HPC.

Some researchers have argued that clouds might not be good enough for running MPI applications. It can be true to a certain extent because of the virtualization overhead and possible network latencies. But that doesn’t anyway mean clouds are bad for any scientific application, simply because MPI apps represent only a small percentage of scientific applications.

If you know about workflow engines, Taverna, Kepler are well-known systems. These systems are pioneers in running workflows in your desktop or in a single server. Most of the workflows hosted in myexperiment.org are scufl based taverna workflows. All or most of these workflows doesn’t require MPI or HPC resources to run them. Yet they are scientific applications.

One could argue that most of the workflows hosted in myexperiment.org are bio workflow. Yes, but there are lots of other scientists who use Taverna and Kepler systems who has monolithic workflows, which can be run easily on clouds.

Also there are lots of scientists who doesn’t have access to any of the national or research grids. Also they don’t have very large clusters to run their experiments.

Even if you own a cluster, to get the data of an experiment, which is to be included in a paper with a deadline coming in few days, having more on-demand resources might be useful.

The important thing I wanted to point out this.

It is wrong to generally say that clouds are bad for scientific application. It might be true for certain class of applications (like MPI), but there are tons of other scientific applications that can benefit from cloud resources.

*let me clarify this a little bit. For most of the people when they say MPI, it is implicit that message passing within workers is a must. But at the same time, gurus who oppose MapReduce, which has no or few message passing, consider MapReduce to be a specific problem of MPI. So when I say MPI here, I mean to say algorithms that require high-level bandwidth for message passing

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Road Trip to Redmond, WA from Bloomington, IN – Day Notes

May 3rd

Approximate Distance : 514 miles
Destination : West Des Moines, IA
Map

Started early in the morning (around 11.30am :) ) from Bloomington. GPS wanted me to go through Indianapolis, but I wanted to follow what GMaps suggested me to go through IN-46 and IN-43.

Passed through the other Bloomington in Illinois. Passed through Illinois and entered Iowa. Iowa had well maintained rest areas with wireless internet.

May 4th

Approximate Distance : 614 miles
Destination : Rapid City, SD
Map

This was the most hectic day for everyone. Whole drive through South Dakota was scary, secluded. No fast foods for 150 miles. Rest areas and gas stations were far away. We could see miles far away through the road, without a single vehicle.

But the good thing was for the first time, the speed limit was 75mph.

May 5th

Approximate Distance : 539 miles
Destination : Livingston, MT
Map

Early morning went to see Mount Rushmore. Since it was noon by then, we had to give up the idea of visiting Crazy horse monument.

This time GPS suggested to take US-212 from Spearfish, SD as it is more direct route than I-90 towards Hardin, MT. Total distance through US-212 was 248 miles, but I saw only one gas station for the whole distance. It was very secluded and if something happened to us, we could have been waiting hours for some one to come. Even though this route saved about 1.5 hrs, I don’t recommend any one to take it, if you are not sure about the vehicle.

May 6th

Approximate Distance : 146 miles
Destination : West Yellowstone, MT
Map

Drove towards Yellowstone park, through Gardiner, MT. It was raining and also was cold. Visited Norris, Canyon village areas and Madison. Unfortunately most of the time it was only me driving in that direction to most of these places. Because of my past experience with deer crossings, I was scared to drive fast also.

Even though we never encountered bears and wolves on the road, park rangers warned about those animals as those creatures are coming out of hibernation and were really hungry and dangerous.

May 7th

Approximate Distance : 152 miles
Destination : Bozeman, MT
Map

Drove to old faithful area and watched the beauty of it. Also had the chance to see many geysers and springs around that area. On our way to grand geyser, we saw a wolf chasing a herd of bisons and a calf. But it gave up the chase and came towards us, scaring all the people near us. Fortunately nothing happened.

When we were coming back, a snow storm came in and the rangers had to close the road out of old faithful temporarily.

May 8th

Approximate Distance : 477 miles
Destination : Spokane, WA
Map

This was a very interesting drive, through MT, ID and WA. I was a fan of Need for speed for a long time, but never had a real chance to experience it. But between St Regis and Henderson, MT I really got the chance to do that sort of driving. US roads are excellent in making turns so that they will make sure one can take the bends at the posted speed + 10mph without any problem. But this area had many bends within very short distance making it very very interesting NFS like drive.

Even in Idaho it was beautiful when we went through Rocky mountains. I-90 through Idaho was very beautiful than any other places we drove so far. But the speed limit was dropped to 60mph in lots of places.

Since we reached Spokane early, we had the chance of visiting river front park and to take the skyride to see Spokane falls.

May 9th

Approximate Distance : 281 miles
Destination : Redmond, WA
Map

Being the last leg of the journey, I was sort of happy.

Most of the parts of I-90, through Washington, till Snoqualmie pass, was just like in Montana or South Dakota. No gas stations or fast foods places, but there were lots of vehicle on the road.

Snoqualmie pass was very beautiful with all the snowy mountains and lakes.

Photos of the Yellowstone park visit and road trip can be found in my facebook profile.

Next challenge is drive back to Bloomington, IN after my internship.

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Road Trip to Redmond, WA from Bloomington, IN – Summary

This sounded little bit crazy for me (initially) and for most of the people, but I really wanted to do this because,

1. Last time when I was in MSR, one of my fellow intern had done this with his family with 3 children
2. I always wanted to go across USA to see different states, outside of suburban areas.

When I get the chance to go to MSR this time also, I thought of driving there. A big thank should go to Fazni for encouraging me and to Thushari and Dihini for always staying with me at all times.

Summary

Total Distance : 2723 miles (including drive within Yellowstone)

Time: 7 days (with total driving time of about 45hrs)

Fuel Consumption :

Total Gallons : 92.7

Average Gas Price : $2.2225 (lowest in Indiana $1.999, highest in Washington $2.4)

Maximum Speed : 75mph + allowance (which I’m not gonna mention here ;) )

Driving Experience :

Best area to drive : Between St. Regis and Henderson in Montana. This area gave me the real feeling of Need for speed, taking very sharp turns at 80mph (without drifting) :)

Worst area to drive : South Dakota. and US-212. Damn it, no gas station, food or even a human for hundreds of miles. Some times I was scared to death.

Places visited : Yellowstone National Park for two days, Mount Rushmore and Spokane Falls.

Map

View Road trip to Seattle in a larger map

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