Rafique Advisor: Med-One Huddersfield

Introduction

Med-One is considered one of the best restaurants in Huddersfield. At the time of writing this review it sits at #26 of TripAdvisor's list of top restaurants in Huddersfield, however it remains in contention for #1 on RafiqueAdvisor.

It is a Lebanese restaurant concentrating on Mediterranean and Levantine cusines [1].

Restaurant

Having run successfully for the past few years, the restaurant has recently been revamped and now includes a large second floor space, though I have never been seated there. The clean white walls are adorned with various reminders of head chef Khalil's heritage, and the smell from the kitchen greets you as you arrive.

Service

Though waiters and waitresses seem to change every month, the majordomo has been a stalwart figure, and remains the highest authority when asking for recommendations or the contents of a dish. The pace of Med-One is somewhat laid back, however when times are busy or you sit amongst a large group, efficiency is high and food is delivered hot and in one go.

Food

A few favourites for your perusal.

Starters

Chef's Bread (V): Two freshly baked breads (similar to lavas bread), that are both soft and crispy, lightly sprinkled with herbs and served with two dips. This is an appetiser that I always order as the mains here are quite large and a starter is not always necessary. The two dips (one yoghurt based, one tomato/chilli based) are unlike anything you would expect, and both are rather refreshing.

Taken from the Med-One website

Kubbeh Makliye: A hot starter for those that wish to try something new. Minced lamb surrounded by a combination of crushed wheat and lean minced lamb, served with a taratour dip (yoghurt, garlic, sesame paste) and side salad. A serving usually contains 3 Kubbeh Makliye.

Mains

Goulash: Perhaps not what you would expect in a Lebanese restaurant, but this dish is my personal favourite.Mixed peppers, diced beef, courgette, aubergine, tomatoes, garlic, herbs and spices with freshly baked bread topping, served with rice and side salad. Ask for extra thyme for a distinct flavour. Also available as a vegetarian dish, this should more than satisfy your taste buds. When done properly the tender beef absorbs the rich flavours, and is complemented well by the bread and rice.

Kebab Halabi (Aleppo Kebab): A large kebab for the hungry carnivore. Lamb kebabs in freshly baked Lebanese flatbreads served with chopped parsley, finely sliced red onion, copped tomato, drizzled with lemon juice, and seasoned with sumac. This dish contains a hefty helping of lamb, and though it may seem simple from the description, you will enjoy it.

Kevino Pizza

Kevino Pizza: A folded pizza containing tomato sauce, cheddar cheese, shredded lamb, baked then filled with fresh tomatoes, finely sliced onions, peppers, lettuce and drizzled with garlic sauce. A new pizza experience, this feast will leave you content and possibly drowsy.

Maqluba: Rice cooked with seasoned grilled chicken and aubergine topped with lightly toasted pine nuts, served with side salad and tsatsiki. Tender chicken and flavoursome rice, this is a smaller dish than most, and as such makes a good lunch option. 

Deserts

Qatayef, from Med-One's Facebook page

Med-One's deserts are it's weak point. With a very small selection as it is normal to finish a meal with tea or coffee. All deserts are nut-heavy for those with allergies, and incredibly rich. I would recommend trying Qatayef; a crepe like desert filled with clotted cream or walnuts & cinnamon. 

Wine

My friend and colleague David Bruton is something of a connoisseur when it comes to wine. He recommends the £40 bottle of Lebanese red.

Rating

A light and airy setting, excellent food, and warm service. In my opinion the best place to eat in Huddersfield, perhaps Sir Patrick Stewart agrees.

Sir Patrick Stewart at Med One

 I award Med One 5 stars.

[1] http://www.med-one.co.uk/about/

Rafique Advisor

Over the past few years I have visited many restaurants in Manchester and Huddersfield, mostly because I lived on the Curry Mile and near Huddersfield town centre. After giving advice on local eateries, my friend and colleague Jordan Taylor started referring to my advice as 'Rafique Advisor'.

So in order to help others when making important eating decisions, I have decided to put these 'reviews' on this blog, and perhaps make a new blog if they become too numerous.

All views are my own.

Hartree Summer School 2014: High Performance Computing

The Hartree Centre is an STFC centre for scientific computing, home to the UK's fastest academic super computer - Blue Joule an IBM Bluegene/Q, an amazing visualisation suite, and support for all HPC applications in research and industry.

The Course

Prof. Jack Dongarra (Uni. Tennessee, Uni. Manchester, Oak Ridge) lead the teaching staff of the week long event along with Dr. Kirk Jordan (IBM), the school was capably organised by Terry Hewitt, Damian Jones and Dave Cable from the STFC. The whole event was 3 weeks - the first on visualisation and the last on big data, though I only attended the middle week on HPC.

The week involved talks and practical sessions on; general HPC (Jack Dongarra), parallel programming with X10 (Olivier Tardieu, IBM), OpenMP (Christian Terboven, RWTH Aachen), MPI (Chris Wareing, Uni. Leeds), numerical linear algebra (Julien Langou, Uni. Colorado), HPC architectures (Kirk Jordan), computational steering (John Brooke, Uni. Manchester), visualisation (David Duke, Uni. Leeds), and big data (Chris Williams, IBM).

David Duke from the University of Leeds giving a talk on visualisation

Although the course was largely attended by computer scientists, there were also many other scientists, including those from physics, engineering, chemistry, and business.

The weather was surprisingly good over the week, breaks were spent on the canal bank.

The Bridgewater canal running alongside Daresbury Laboratory

Blue Joule

The Hartree Centre is home to the UK's 3rd most powerful supercomputer ( #14 top500 list 39, June 2012, #23 top500 list 43, June 2014). We visited Blue Joule and Blue Wonder. Blue Joule is a 1.2 Petaflop/s 131,072 core IBM BlueGene/Q. Blue Wonder is a 158.7 TeraFlop 8192 core iDataplex.

The ~21 Petabytes of tape storage for Blue Joule taken from here

The rooms are temperature controlled and full of cameras. Some of the racks are water cooled, others are not. The systems contained a lot of varied hardware, including; FPGAs, Xeon Phis, standard nodes, large amounts of memory (tape, HDD, and flash), switches, controllers, power supplies and plenty of cabling. We were told that the system is the largest USB hub in the UK (at >2048 USB connections). Blue Joule is also one of the greenest supercomputers in the world.

Blue Wonder taken from here

Blue Joule taken from here

Visualisation Suite

Hartree has a rather large stereographic 3D power screen for visualisation of scientific data. Some useful features include the ability to observe simulations (running on Blue Joule) in real time, allowing a user to change simulation variables if necessary. For example if something has gone beyond a realistic physical limit, a job can be stopped (saving money, time, and power), or variables can be changed to make the most of remaining resources.

3D Visualisation Suite taken from here

Information on the visualisation opportunities available at the Hartree Centre can be found here.

Interesting Facts

• OpenMP and X10 (developed by IBM for the past ~decade) are mainly designed to implement task based code on many core machines, whereas MPI is designed to allow users to work across many nodes or machines. OpenMP is a model for shared memory machines.
• Although the top HPC machines (top500) may cost over 200 million dollars each, the cost of power, maintenance, cooling etc is often much more. Running costs can mean that the total cost of buying, running, and maintaining a top500 machine for ~5 years can be over $1 billion.
• After the HPC system lifetime (~5 years) is over, the machines are often scrapped (literally), the silicon isn't reused and gold is often stripped from the machine boards.
• The power use of a processor scales like it's frequency cubed (f^3), which is why chip manufacturers move into increased transistor density rather than increasing the frequency when improving processor performance.



Slide delivered by Intel, taken from this article

• Intel are soon to release a standalone Xeon Phi CPU called Knights Landing, which will deliver 3 TeraFlops, and as it is does not have to be used as a coprocessor via PCI-Express, it should offer massive performance gains over existing 'accelerators' such as GPUs and existing Xeon Phi (Knights Corner), which are bottlenecked by the PCIe bus.
• Power consumption is the primary design constraint for future HPC system design.

Adventure Time

Myself and David Bruton decided to walk from Daresbury Laboratories to the Britannia Daresbury Park hotel. There was some confusion when we encountered an abandoned bridge.

The abandoned bridge that we mistakenly tried to cross

Dave on said bridge

The old, 20 million Volt, vertical tandem Van De Graaff accelerator at Daresbury Laboratories

Follow the Hartree Centre on Twitter @HartreeCentre

Outreach: The Physics of Frisbees

When the weather is nice, the laboratory can get rather warm. Doing an experiment outside with Frisbees can be both fun and informative, as well as a good introduction to the scientific method.

How a Frisbee works

Image from http://web.wellington.org/miller/frisbee.gif

A Frisbee creates a difference in pressure due to it's curvature. As shown in the diagram above, air travels faster over the curved surface and thus a higher pressure is created underneath the Frisbee, giving it lift.

As the Frisbee is travelling in air, a drag force is exerted on it in the opposite direction to that of it's motion.

Another physical effect is that of gyroscopic motion. As the lift force acting upon the Frisbee is centred near the front of the Frisbee, it will experience a torque which tends to flip the Frisbee over if it is not spinning. When it is spinning, the gyroscopic phenomena of precession occurs. In this case the spinning means that the torque enacts over many points on the disc, and it's net force is negligible.

Normally a Frisbee has small ridges on the top of the disc, these cause a small amount of turbulence, this allows the Frisbee to travel further.

Simple free body diagram

Finally we consider the angle of the disc. In the above diagram the Frisbee is flat, in reality it is usually tilted at some angle to the horizontal. The launch angle will affect both the lift and drag force exerted upon the Frisbee, as this will determine how much air is deflected downwards and upwards by the edge of the disc. The disc is more likely to curve towards the direction of spin if it is released at a larger angle because of this.

Gravity will eventually cause the disc to hit the ground.

Modern Frisbees are hollow discs rather than the more conventional solid discs. The modern design has a few advantages. Firstly increasing the curvature on the outer edge and inner edge means that air will flow over two surfaces rather than just the one. There is usually a small groove on the underside of the disc which increases it's lift, and the disc can be somewhat flexible, which should reduce it's drag slightly as it can adapt to changes in wind direction etc.

Equipment

You will require a reasonably long and straight patch of grass, as well as the following.

• Long piece of string (~40m)
• Wooden skewers or similar (to stick into the ground)
• Tape measure
• 2 Frisbees, one solid disc and one hollow disc
• Pen & paper

Method

Stick a wooden skewer into the ground and tie one end of the string to it. Lay the string in a straight line, using the skewers to mark every few metres, I recommend every 5 metres.

Get the participants to throw each Frisbee a number of times (using the below points of investigation) and observe the behaviour when different tilt angles / amounts of spin etc are used.

Try to get the participants to investigate the below points and think about why this behaviour is observed. Adding competition is usually a good way to get participants interested in the optimum throwing conditions. For example a competition for longest distance travelled, straightest flight etc.

Points of Investigation

• Due to the shape of the Frisbee, its aerodynamic benefits are not utilised if the disc is thrown upside down.
• Throwing the Frisbee perfectly horizontally should maximise the distance it will travel.
• If released at a large tilt angle but thrown slightly upwards, the disc should fly in a projectile trajectory, but fly to the left/right of the intended direction.
• Increasing the amount of spin should increase it's stability, decreasing or throwing with no spin will result it a very short travel distance due to the torque pitching the disc over.
• Using both a regular solid disc and a modern hollow disc Frisbee may result in the hollow disc travelling further.

If all else fails, you can always stand in a circle throwing a Frisbee around whilst discussing Physics and answering any questions that the participants have.

Installing Google Chrome (& Repository) on Fedora

First use wget to download the GPG key:

$ wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

Next import to RPM:

$ rpm --import linux_signing_key.pub

Now create and edit a file in /etc/yum.repos.d/ named google.repo

$ sudo gedit /etc/yum.repos.d/google.repo &

Edit the file to contain the following:

[google64]
name=Google-x86_64
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

Finally use yum to update and install chrome:

$ sudo yum install chrome
$ sudo yum update