Babar khan

Babar khan

Electrical Engineer | PhD Candidate | Software-Hardware Developer

I have termed series of random blog posts as Echo Chamber.

2024

Feels good to be mentioned in HPCwire: Global News on High Performance Computing (HPC)

1 minute read

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In 2023, I had attended the in-person International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (commonly known as SC 2023) in Denver, Colorado, USA. Being November in Denver, the weather was as expected—cold but sunny (my kind of weather). SC is always a week-long event, and since I arrived a day or two before the official start, I decided to collect my badge early to avoid the long queues on opening day. After picking up my badge, I thought, why not take a walk around the Colorado Convention Center as a warm-up for the upcoming conference days? While exploring the area, I noticed some talks taking place in one of the halls at the Convention Center. Read more

Infineon Quantum Computing Winter School 2024

less than 1 minute read

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I have not been involved in Quantum Computing research topics, but like most researchers (read PhD candidate) in Computer Science and software-hardware engineer, I have been intrigued by the topic. Attending SC 2023 in Denver, Colorado, USA, was icing on the cake where QC was a dominating topic both in research and industrial tracks. Luckily the stars aligned and I had an opportunity to attend virtually Quantum Computing (QC) Winter School 2024 in February 2024 by Infineon. Infineon Technologies AG is Germany’s largest semiconductor manufacturer. Read more

NVIDIA AI Instructor led Training: Building Transformer-Based Natural Language Processing Applications

less than 1 minute read

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To stay well-informed about the scientific (fine-granular) aspects of Artificial Intelligence, I took the opportunity to enroll in an instructor-led training program titled “Building Transformer-Based Natural Language Processing Applications.” Through this training, I acquired knowledge on utilizing Transformer-based natural language processing models for tasks like text classification, including the categorization of documents. Additionally, I learned how to harness Transformer-based models for tasks such as named-entity recognition (NER). The training equipped me with the skills to analyze different model features, constraints, and characteristics, enabling me to determine the most suitable model for a specific use case based on metrics, domain specificity, and available resources. Read more

2023

In my hand: The new Seagate HAMR disk at SC 2023 exhibition, Denver, Colorado, USA

less than 1 minute read

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Last week, I attended SC 2023 in Denver, Colorado, USA. The SC Conference brought together a vast assembly of participants, numbering 14 thousand this year, from the international high-performance computing community. It served as a nexus for scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators, and developers worldwide. Simultaneously, SC provided manufacturers, vendors, research institutions, and HPC service providers with a venue in the form of an exhibition. This year’s event featured approximately 438 exhibitors, among them Seagate. Read more

CISPA 2023 System Security event in-person, Saarland, Germany, 2023

less than 1 minute read

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Thanks to the travel grant, I had an opportunity to attend CISPA 2023 in August 2023. The CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security is a German national Big Science Institution within the Helmholtz Association. Their research encompasses all aspects of Information Security. This year‘s international CISPA Summer School had a focus on System Security with one week of talks, hands-on sessions, discussions, and a social program such as a pub quiz. The event included sessions by 8 invited speakers and 5 CISPA Faculty. Read more

DevConf 2023 in-person, Brno, Czech Republic

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During my PhD I have been working on topics related to Linux operating system (to be precise Linux storage) and open source projects. This compelled me to attend in-person DevConf.CZ in Brno, Czech Republic 2023 that is annual, free, Red Hat sponsored community conference for developers, admins, DevOps engineers, testers, documentation writers and other contributors to open source technologies. Although it was a three days event with a very interesting itinerary of technical talks, below is the list of some of the talks relevant to my research and everyday tasks: Read more

2022

Dan Kohn Scholarship for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022, Detroit, USA

less than 1 minute read

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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology and align the tech industry around its evolution. It was announced alongside Kubernetes 1.0, an open source container cluster manager, which was contributed to the Linux Foundation by Google as a seed technology. Founding members include Google, CoreOS, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Twitter, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Docker, Univa, and VMware.[2][3] Today, CNCF is supported by over 450 members. Since cloud and storage is part of my research, I was lucky to attend KubeCon 2022 in-person in Detroit, USA. Read more

2021

Xilinx XACC Winter school 2021

less than 1 minute read

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Xilinx, Inc. is an American semiconductor company that is primarily a supplier of programmable logic devices. The company invented the Field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Yes, you read it correctly, The FPGA ! Considering the rapid growth of FPGAs accelerators in data-centers and various other fields, it is not easy to keep up the pace with the knowledge base of modern FPGAs. These bleeding-edge FPGAs are complex and programming them is a hard-problem. Recently Xilinx was gracious enough to organize a Winter School 2021 primarily for PhD researchers who use FPGA and its tool in their research. It was a 5-day school with technical presentations, talks and a project work. The project work was really interesting as we had to use open-source Vitis libraries for the first time. Read more

2020

Data Parallel C++ brief book review and recommendation (Part 1)

3 minute read

Published:

Bjarne Stroustrup has written in one of his books that “Our civilization runs on software”. Hence writing on anything related to software is itself part of learning for me. One such topic is parallel programming which is making inroads in super computing (SC) domain. The SC conference series 2020 has been once again full of tutorials, workshops and novel research papers. As a researcher involved in accelerating algorithms I’m interested in reading different technical books. Read more