First day at ETH
Today was my first day at ETH, and the two lectures I attended were quite good. The first was on Convex Optimization. I’ve previously taken at course dealing with optimization in general, so I was not totally lost when we quickly went through the Simplex method and the weak and strong duality theorems. But I must admit that it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at this kind of stuff…
The second lectures was on a completely different subject: Parallel and Distributed Databases. In the course at DAIMI about programming in the large we were introduced to the relational model for databases. In this course we will look at how queries performed against this model can be parallelized so that they can still be answered quickly. Here we’re talking about queries made against databases with gigabytes or terabytes of data, which is spread over many disks attached to different computers. I think this course will be very interesting!
In this first week there wont be any exercises, but in the coming weeks there will be… It will be interesting to see how they are compared to what I’m used to from DAIMI.
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