Chili Oil Girl

October 18, 2025 | 10:12 PM ET

Hi

Hi everypony. I'm mainly making this blog post because I found out how to make thumbnails that show up when you embed something, like when this post is shared on social media. I'm currently compiling something for FPGAs and it takes a loooong time to do, which means the next 15 minutes are Sophie blog time.

Chili Oil

I put some chili oil (Lao Gan Ma) on some rice I ate last night and it was so yummy. Today, I came home from the lab a little bit early so I could eat some more rice with chili oil. I will make some more rice tomorrow, and maybe some broccoli also.

Proactive

I have lots of things to do right now, so I'm being proactive by working early. You may have heard that I received the reviews for two papers I helped submit to HPCA 2026; the revised papers are due Monday, so I've been helping out with that. A lot of my job has been automating lots of parallel things, so I've been using an Nvidia DGX server to full capacity a lot. Last week, I made a script that runs 200 parallel simulation sessions at once, and a background process which monitors it, sends me a text message when something completes, and launches something new to fill the space. My lab is impressed with me.

There are still lots of things to do, though. The main paper I'm working on this semester is due a month from yesterday (it's being submitted to ISCA). There are only a few things left to do for it, but those few things take a lot of time to do. (I need to change a PyTorch program so that it includes a new hardware instruction in it. The compiler is complete, but making the algorithm work and validating it works both take a lot of effort.) I want to complete it early so I can be proactive.

-Sophie