Karthikeyan Sankaralingam I am a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and expect to graduate in May 2006. I am primarily interested in computer architecture and am currently working on a research project focussed on high performance microprocessors with the goal of designing a technology scalable microarchitecture. More details on a different page. I like running, travelling, experimenting with cooking, and used to dabble in astronomy some time ago. I cats.

Karu's homepage (karu@cs.utexas.edu)

Travel     Running     Food     Scripts     Photos     Cats

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Things I have done - 0

• Evaluating the Instruction Folding Mechanism of the PicoJava processor
• A very simple raytracer Handles reflection, refraction and ambient, diffuse, specular lighting for directional and postional sources. Handles only spheres and planes :-( This is what we needed for one of the course assignments. The code is not documented and is public domain.
• Graph representation: A report I did in a course in formal verification. When I started out with the project the goal was to see if it is possible to come up with a representation more succinct than Binary Decision Diagrams for representing boolean functions. The project turned out to be a survey of the literature and I found out that some succinct representations (motivated primarly by VLSI CAD considerations) can be applied to boolean functions and are as succinct as BDDs.
• FM partitioning, placement and Maze routing: This code does FM paritioning, uses it for doing standard cell placement. A maze router which can do multi-terminal nets then does the routing. Works using a kind of restricted file format specific to VLSI netlists. I wrote this code for a course project and hence it is not well documented :-( Released as public domain.
• Ubiquitous computing using smartcards A project I did, where we motivated the use of smartcards for ubiquitous computing and developed a software prototype. Code not very well documented - released as public domain.

• On the roads
• December 1999 Vacation
• Big Bend National Park - This was sometime in June 2000: A 3 day trip to the Big Bend National Park with 2 of my friends. We spent one day hiking and the next day we almost got stranded in the Santa Elena canyon. We were the only guys going down the canyon that day because the water level had just risen up. Just as we entered the canyon our canoe tipped over twice and we lost all our water and other stuff in our ice box. We were too scared to continue - because the canyon walls were vertical and undercut at someplace and if the canoe tipped over we could easily smash our head on a rock. We could not walk through because the water was too deep. We just waited there without water or food for about 3 hours. Our plan was to wait for daybreak and a rescue team to get us - the person who rented the canoe said she'll send a rescue person if we didn't show up by evening. Anyway a park ranger found us after 3 hours and we refilled our water bottles and he told us the dangerous spots in the canyon and we made our way out and eventually got out just as it was getting dark! Quite a trip
• Mexico - July 4 weekend of 2000. 4 days.
• Peru - August-September of 2000
• Las Vegas - December 2000 - This was a crazy driving trip to Vegas with Hrishi, Ramdas and Ranga - spent exactly one night in Vegas - saw a show by Steve Wyrick, walked around the Vegas strip and drove back home the next day!
• Egypt - August 2001
• Mongolia - September 2004

Things I have done - II

Miscellaneous things will fall here

• Running

  • Completed the Amy's Ice Creams Cattle Drive 10 Miler in 1:28:13.50, October 20, 2002.
  • Completed the Decker Challenge 12 Mile Race in 1:41:18.65, December 18, 2002.
  • Completed a 30K in 3:02:11, Jan 11, 2003. No chip time - this wasn't a real race.
  • Ran my first marathon - the Motorola Marathon 2003 and finished in 03:56:51. During the race - pic1    pic2
    At the finish line. The clock shows 4:00:37. I did break 4hrs though, my chip time was 3:56:51 :-)
  • Completed the 3M Half Marathon in 1:47:31.7
  • Completed my second marathon, Motorola Marathon 2004, cutting almost 10 minutes from last year's time. Chip time 3:47:18.7
  • Completed my third marathon in the remote wildlife of Alaska, Anchorage Marathon 2004, in 3:32:10.5

• Food

  • Carrot hummus - I "discovered/invented" this dish when I realized we had too much carrots in the fridge and nobody at home was eating them. The basic dish is pretty simple: In a standard hummus recipe, replace the garbanzo beans with boiled carrots. Boil the carrots until they are tender and can be mashed into a paste. Blend the carrots, tahini, ginger, lime juice and some olive oil. Proportions of different ingredients aren't that important :-) If you have made this dish before, or if you make it let me know if you ended up liking it :-))
  • Food preservation :: Banana preservation (storage) - This should be credited to my brother Ranga mostly. We discovered the best way for storing bananas! Peel them, put them in a plastic box as a whole and refrigerate them and they keep well for more than 2 weeks, losing none of their taste or texture. My search on the web for storing bananas was futile. So I think this may be something most people are unaware of!

    Also check this out Bananaguard, and Bananabunker.

  • Nutrition spreadsheet. I couldn't quite get a sense of the different nutrition labels on different products because each thing was for a different size. This table summarizes all that and helps you build a menu depending on a a # protein gms you want to hit or number of carbohydrate gms you want to hit. The formulas are based on a 1-2 hour workout (specifically running) per day. If you follow this spreadsheet and don't workout this much, you'll just keep growing.

• Astronomy

  • First attempts
  • Some pictures of the moon during the Lunar Eclipse in October, 2004.
• Some useful scripts - Click here
• Software, ultilities and other stuff I did long back and do not actively support any longer :-)
  More here
• Unquotidian Quotes - A mailing list I used to maintain during 1998-99