Assignment 0

Bio

I spent my first 18 years in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, which hosted a large community of Amish, farmers, university students, and conservatives. Luckily, I left the state to attend Wellesley College in MA, where I majored in physics and mathematics. I spent a year abroad at Oxford University, which was quite enjoyable when it was not raining. When I returned, I completed a senior thesis in which I simulated electrorheological fluids in a shear flow. This research motivated my interests in computational applications of physics. To escape the glacial winters of the northeast and to seek a more liberal political sanctuary, I began graduate school in physics at UC Berkeley in 2003. I am in my second (of hopefully fewer than 10) year.

Research

I am currently working with a computational astrophysics group modeling star formation. The group uses a 3-D parallelized adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code developed at LBL. This code solves the equations of compressible gas dynamics, self-gravity, and single-frequency flux-limited radiation transfer. It has a treatment of dust, stellar winds, and sink particles. For my thesis, I will model massive star formation using a multi-frequency radiation transfer extension of the current radiation solver. The code is written in a combination of C++ and FORTRAN.

Goals for CS 267

In the course of my research I will need to have a thorough understanding of the algorithms and structure of my 3-D AMR code. Due to the number of collaborators and the sophistication of the code, it is unlikely that I will need to optimize the parallelization myself. However, I will need to do performance evaluations and run the code in an efficient and optimal manner. Since this is unlikely to be the last parallel code I work with, I would like to understand how to parallelize and optimize codes in general.

Computer Skills

I prefer Linux/Unix to Windows as a programming environment, but I am familiar with both systems. Through research and personal study I have experience with the programing languages C++, FORTRAN, Perl, LabView, Matlab, IDL, and Java. I have had very little formal training, so my knowledge is a bit patchy.

Case Study: Star Formation using AMR