# How the Rubik's cube gave me a job



## granada (Nov 18, 2012)

Hello there. I want to share a personal experience of how i got a job because of rubik's cube.

Well. I am 18 years old and a have been for about 6-8(i dont remember exactly) years long into computer programming. This year i entered the college and i am studying computer's science.

The same week the class started i meet a guy who as a speed(not much)-cuber, i was fascinated and on the same day o brought a rubik's cube and solved it with some YouTube's tutorial. At the end of the semester i needed to do an program for my language programming class. Then i made one cube solver, and, since i had a lot of time i expanded the program to do some parallel execution. But i didnt had lots of computer to execute the program, so i talked to some teachers and one of then was building on cluster on the department of computation. So i talked to him and he said that i must wait because the cluster wasnt finished. Well, i waited about 2 or 3 weeks and i grew impatient and started my own cluster project inside an open source group named Colmeia. One guy from the Colmeia worked on a cluster at the department of physics one year before and said that one lighting storm screwed up the cluster and it was nonfunctional since them. My 4 computers cluster was working and he said to me that one physic's teacher needed someone to rebuild the cluster. I found the professor, and he said that another student already had taken the opportunity. But... The student said that he would need about 3 months to make the cluster operational, i said that i would need only about one or two weeks. Then i took him to see my own "cluster" and he liked it, so the teacher took me instead the other student . I made the cluster fully operational in 8 days and later i expanded the cluster to use Nvidia's CUDA. Now the cluster have 9.2 teraflops and i work 20 hours per week as a researcher and maintainer of the cluster, and i can use the cluster for my personal projects when no one is fully using the cluster. 



So, this is my history of how did rubik's cube gave me a job.

I also started alone one speed cubing group. On the next semester it will be official. About 6 peoples makes part of the group now, including some teachers.

My name is Renan, i am Brazilian, student at UDESC(university of the state of Santa Catarina). I solve the 3x3x3 using (almost full)fridrich's method. My personal records are 27.03 avg and 22.22 single. I also solve the 2x2x2 with a record of 3.54 and an avg of 11.72. Now i am going into blind both on 2x2x2 and 3x3x3.

Well, i hope you guys liked and thanks for your attention. 

Ps: Self taught English. I bet that there is a lot of grammar problems. Sorry for that.


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## CarlBrannen (Nov 18, 2012)

Nah, your English is easily understood. I'll tell you a story.

A computer programmer I knew was raised in the US but after he got his degree he moved to Brazil where he worked as a computer programmer. After a while people got so used to him that they didn't know he was from the US. One day a group of people he was in got into a disagreement over what a bit of Microsoft documentation meant. Then one of the guys said, he you should trust (my friend) because he speaks English as his mother tongue." But in fact, documentation is often impossible to understand because it's badly written in English.


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## James Cavanauh (Nov 18, 2012)

That's really cool, congrats! And to bandwagon, your english is fine.


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## MarcelP (Nov 18, 2012)

Awesome stuff man. You sound like a pretty smart Einstein to me!


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## stoic (Nov 18, 2012)

Great story!


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## granada (Nov 18, 2012)

Oh, thank you.

I always try to give my best.

Your comments are very motivational to me.


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## 5BLD (Nov 18, 2012)

Inspiring! Nice break from the constant "you won't get a job with cubing" and "you won't get a job with computing" I hear.


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## ben1996123 (Nov 18, 2012)

5BLD said:


> Inspiring! Nice break from the constant "you won't get a job with cubing" and "you won't get a job with computing" I hear.



you willn't get a job with maff either


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## 5BLD (Nov 18, 2012)

ben1996123 said:


> you willn't get a job with maff either



Nowadays it seems the set of jobs not in the set of brain surgeons nor doctors is an empty set, doesn't it?


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## ben1996123 (Nov 18, 2012)

5BLD said:


> Nowadays it seems the set of jobs not in the set of brain surgeons nor doctors is an empty set, doesn't it?



ino, i hate stupid people too.


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## Lucas Garron (Nov 23, 2012)

So, now the real question is: how fast can you solve a Rubik's Cube on the cluster?
If you have 18^2 or 18^3 parallel searches, you can guarantee that one of them will find a solution in 18/17 moves, which really helps.

I've kind of wanted to try this, but I don't have access to enough machines.


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## Cheese11 (Nov 23, 2012)

5BLD said:


> Inspiring! Nice break from the constant "you won't get a job with cubing" and "you won't get a job with computing" I hear.



People tell you that you won't get a job in computing?! That's like one of the highest demanding jobs out there.


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## granada (Nov 23, 2012)

Lucas Garron said:


> So, now the real question is: how fast can you solve a Rubik's Cube on the cluster?
> If you have 18^2 or 18^3 parallel searches, you can guarantee that one of them will find a solution in 18/17 moves, which really helps.
> 
> I've kind of wanted to try this, but I don't have access to enough machines.



Usually on the second half of second semester of year, the cluster is working at almost full load. So i have not been doing much research about rubiks cube. But using all gpus and the cpus is possible to get about 17k threads running at the same time.

If u have/know some software that work with openMPI/cuda/opencl, you can tell me and i can run it on the cluster.


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## lcsbiffi (Nov 23, 2012)

A living proof that brazilian people are not completely stupid 

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Ae muleque, mandou muito


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