Saturday, November 24, 2018

Updated material on Horton Machine


The Horton Machine is our set of tools for terrain analysis actually maintained by Hydrologis. They since 2000 and something took care of keeping my tools alive on various platforms: GRASSJGrassuDig and now on gvSIG. We also have a porting of the Horton machine that works under GEOframe but is the same codebase.

Silvia Franceschi and Andrea Antonello gave a tutorial at this year gvSIG conference and here it is the material.


You can find the same material also at this osf project. Soon they will follow some theoretical lectures.

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Life After Ph.D. (especially for Italians but of general interest)

This is part of the Ph.D. days of Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering of University of Trento. October 29, 30, 31 were used to check the advancement of our almost one hundred Ph.D. students. Who was moving to the first to the second year, who from the second to the third, who had to prove to be able to write the final Thesis after the third year.
I think professor Scardi offered a good overview, worth to be listened to.

Friday, November 16, 2018

Parallel Computing in GEOframe

Inside our University we have a group that works on parallel computing. My colleagues work in various directions, using standard technologies as OpenMP or MPI. I confess I am very ignorant on the details. However, starting from our hydrological problems, it happens that we embraced OMS that implements an intrinsic parallelism which acts between components. Besides, my PhD student Francesco Serafin, introduced a new way to parallelize our problems called Net3. All of these things are shortly presented in the slides below.
The link, here.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

HPC school for PhD students at Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering

Among the initiative organized by our doctoral school there is this introduction to computing that can be od interest for beginners (with a little attitude).

Here below, please find the Software Carpentry lectures that were streamed on YouTube and are now present at our Department page.



Unix Shell introduction


Jupyter notebooks and a little of Python programming




Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Crocus and Snowpack in a nutshell

There is not an enormous choice of process based models that treat snow Among them, two that are a reference for us are Snowpack and Crocus. Here it is their essential references.

SNOWPACK

CROCUS

Thursday, November 8, 2018

The flood/L'alluvione by Eugenio Montale



The flood has drowned the clutter
of forniture,  papers, and paintings that crammed
the double-padlocked cellar. 
Maybe they fought back blindly-the books 
in red morocco. Du Bos’s endless dedications, 
the wax seal with Ezra’s beard, Alain’s 
Valéry, the manuscript
of the Orphic Songs, as well as a couple 
of shaving brushes, a thousand knicknacks, and all 
your brother Silvio’s compositions. 
Ten, twelve days in that savage maw 
of fuel-oil and shit. Clearly they suffered 
terribly before losing their identity. 
I’m deep in crud too, up to my neck, though 
my civil status was doubtful from the outset. 
It’s not muck that besets me, but the events 
of an unbelievable, and always unbelieved, reality. 
My courage in facing it was the first 
of your loans, and perhaps you never knew. 


Eugenio Montale (see also here), Xenia I, appeared in Agni 34 

(translation by William Arrowsmith



L’alluvione ha sommerso il pack dei mobili,
delle carte, dei quadri che stipavano
un sotterraneo chiuso a doppio lucchetto.
Forse hanno ciecamente lottato i marocchini
 rossi, le sterminate dediche di Du Bos,
il timbro a ceralacca con la barba di Ezra,
il Valéry di Alain, l’originale 
dei Canti Orfici – e poi qualche pennello
da barba, mille cianfrusaglie e tutte 
 le musiche di tuo fratello Silvio.
Dieci, dodici giorni sotto un’atroce morsura
di nafta e sterco. Certo hanno sofferto
tanto prima di perdere la loro identità.
Anch’io sono incrostato fino al collo se il mio
stato civile fu dubbio fin dall’inizio.
Non torba m’ha assediato, ma gli eventi
di una realtà incredibile e mai creduta.
Di fronte ad essi il mio coraggio fu il primo
dei tuoi prestiti e forse non l’hai mai saputo.

For a comment in Italian see here