My time in Austin is (sigh) almost over, but I wanted to start posting some things about the trip, I guess we’ll all be catching up for awhile (see Riley’s post in the Group blog). It’s been such a privilege to be at UT Austin for over 2 months as a Tinsley Visiting Professor. I am one of those people who needs uninterrupted blocks of time to think, whether it’s for writing or coming up with new ideas. Being in a university environment is very stimulating, but because many things in our schedules are out of our control (teaching, staff meetings, organisational meetings etc), our days get filled up with disparate blocks of commitment, and it is very difficult to reserve longer chunks of time to focus on research. Having the chance to come to Austin and interact with a great group of colleagues (in particular Profs. Volker Bromm, Dan Jaffe, John Kormendy, Pawan Kumar, Milos Milosavljevic and Craig Wheeler), and to have the space to finish off older projects while starting fresh ones has just been a complete luxury. I will post in more detail about these projects soon as follow ups to this post. Having some of my group here with me for the first month was also fantastic, because we had more time to interact than in Amsterdam, and they were able to see how science is done in a different international institute. Plus we had a lot of fun:
They also were kind enough to give me a great office on the 16th floor with fantastic views, and lent me and my group bicycles in true Dutch style!
UT Austin is also the host of one of the largest supercomputing facilities in the US, the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Several of the projects I am involved in require very large compute clusters to run massively parallel simulations of the magnetised plasma around black holes. At the moment one of my MSc students, Matthew, is running simulations on Stampede and Maverick, the latter of which runs on GPUs, the same processors that video games run on, via our collaboration with Sasha Tchekhovskoy. Thanks to Niall Gaffney, the director of data intensive computing, we got a private tour of the facilities (aka the “blinky lights tour!”) and I got to see the computers behind some of my research (note the longhorn on top of Stampede):
Niall also took me to see the VisLab, which is a bit Mission Impossible:
This is a picture of me in front of the very apropos van Gogh painting, but they use this to blow up extremely high resolution photos of art for study. If you look up close you can see not only brush strokes with perfect colour but also cracks in the paint, texture changes, etc., it’s pretty impressive:
Anyway, more to come, but that’s why things have been somewhat quiet, but I’ve been harassing my group to post more on our blog, so I figured I better get something posted myself!
