HIPACC Begins
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010Melissa and I traveled to UC Santa Cruz on Sunday for the UC-HIPACC summer school. Santa Cruz is disappointing thus far because, before I came here, several people told me that the area and the campus were “nice” or even “beautiful”. The campus and the surrounding area are better than Riverside in some ways, but the climate is very cold and I have not yet seen anything that would qualify as “beautiful”. We’ll see if that changes; I haven’t seen the entire campus yet. We also haven’t gone to the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park yet.
The summer school has been the highlight of the trip so far. It’s nice to be surrounded by other people who work with simulations. I haven’t really experienced that since I graduated from GMU in 2008. The presentations this week have been focussed on the simulation codes ART and Enzo as well as the visualization and analysis package, YT. Many of the presentations were similar to the presentations that I gave at UCR earlier this year. While I haven’t learned anything fundamentally new yet, I have become inspired to learn the Python programming / scripting language. I stayed up late last night learning the basics of Python and playing around with the IPython shell. Unfortunately that has caused me to be too sleepy to focus today.
All of the students have been given time on the Triton supercomputer in San Diego so we can run mini simulations and analyze data. I haven’t wasted any of my computing time yet so I’ll have more time to use GADGET, Sunrise, or my own little code.
I expect the next two weeks to be more interesting because GADGET and Sunrise will be discussed. Hopefully I’ll also have some time to work on the code for my qualifier project as well!
