Studying at the best Universitie in Singapore-NUS

I am very honored to have passed the selection process and joined NUS this summer to learn about cloud computing from Professor Richard TB Ma.

Prof.Richard TB Ma @ NUS

NUS is indeed the richest school in Singapore. I stayed in PGPR (NUS College Residential Area). The dormitory environment is very good. Each of us has an independent room. I like the window in front of the desk very much. I can clearly see the beautiful scenery outside.

PGPR Dorm

Nice room!

However, in terms of infrastructure, I think SUSTech is better, except that I cannot enjoy a single room at SUSTech. By the way, NUS is built on a mountain, and the terrain is very complex. Google Maps is of limited use here because the three-dimensional space is fully utilized.

NUS Mountains

Fortunately, the food here suits my taste very well. This may be related to the large number of Chinese in Singapore. They cook Chinese food even more deliciously than in mainland China, and the price is not expensive, probably similar to that in Shanghai. You can be full for about 30CNY. Hainanese chicken rice is my favorite.

Breakfast with my friend

I am honored to have made three other very, very good friends here. They are all computer science students. Zhengdong has a deep understanding of distributed databases, and Yicheng is a full-stack expert. It is said that Zhengdong will go to the University of Toronto for a research internship soon, and Yicheng wants to go to UC Berkly.

Excellent Teammates!

During this period, I have been fascinated by the research of K8S. In the past, my research in the field of HPC has always focused on physical machines. This time, I learned that we can easily manage computing resources through containerization and realize excellent cloud-native applications through cloud deployment. Finally, we developed a multi-terminal cloud-native application that can withstand a large number of user loads: GroupUp. The inspiration for developing this application came from the matching problem encountered by everyone when forming a team on the first day of class. The recommendation algorithm is indeed a topic worth studying in the field of computer science. We designed this software to use the recommendation algorithm to provide everyone with the possibility of quickly matching with suitable teammates based on information.

GroupUp Posters

Of course, the development process is difficult. We have multiple containers to deploy various services to achieve non-stop updates during the development process. We also use K8S’s ingress technology for load balancing and traffic distribution. We try to learn and use many distributed technologies based on cloud native applications, such as Reddis distributed database and RabbitQ message queue. What drives me crazy is that the night before the presentation, the image of RabbitQ queue on Docker Hub had a bug and update. The old image caused the message queue service to crash. I debugged for a long time but didn’t expect that the image of the container itself would have a temporary problem. Fortunately, the presentation process went smoothly.

Nice Try

K8S has become the best solution for virtual clusters, and its open source community is also growing. In the field of machine learning, combined with my research expertise, technical models such as KubeFlow and FedKube will become the direction I want to explore in the future.