Table of Contents

Family

Went on a cleaning binge. Not sure why sometimes I get totally obsessed with cleaning but yesterday was one of those spurts. I had watched about a dozen YouTube videos (from Clean My Space) on cleaning tutorials, followed by vigorouly scrubbing down stove tops with baking soda and vinegar, buying cleaning supplies (e.g. micro fiber, empty bottles for home made cleaning supplies) from both Ace Hardware and Big Lots, and ending the day with wiping down the entire marble kitchen counter
Got into an argument with Jess around finances. Seems like talking about finances triggers me, the topic putting me in a bad mood almost every time. Although I have some ideas on why this is the case, I cannot exactly pinpoint why I go into fight or flight mode.But if I’m honest, I do find the idea of splitting the money down the middle uncomfortable. But I know that’s ridiculous. I do want to sort out these feelings but I think they run deep and stem from my awful past experiences with money between me and my family members.

Graduate School

Chatted over the phone with my project partner. After working together on the previous assignment (i.e. Project 2 on Synchronization Barriers), my project partner (Will) and I have decided to work together again for project 3 (using gRPC and building a multi-threaded, asynchronous web server). We’re approaching the division of work a bit differently than last time, when I took on majority of the development and he took on the performance testing and benchmarking. This time around, we’re going to try and parallelize the work and split down the development (and design) right down the middle.

Completed lectures on distributed shared memory and started on distributed shared memory. The biggest take away for me (so far) for the distributed shared memory lectures is that from a sequential consistency perspective, the system does not distinguish a read/write for a normal memory data access from a read/write of a synchronization read/write variable. Why does this even matter? At first, I could not my wrap my head around the significance of this idea and how/why this related to distributed shared memory. But the more I thought about, the more it makes sense: if a thread locks a critical section and updates one (or more) variable(s), why generate cache coherence while inside the critical section — why not wait until an unlock happens? Actually, as I type this out, there might be a good reason: for readers of that variable to make forward progress on their (non critical) section.

Why do we have a GCD (global cache directory) and how does this “one level of indirection” help as part of building the larger global memory system?