Projects Great and Small

Much has happened over the past two months. I have a new position, working from 6:00 AM to 2:30 PM PST. It took surprisingly less time than I expected to get used to my new sleep schedule, and it gives me plenty of time to work in the afternoon.

Aside from my work, I’ve been re-reading my copy of the classic programming book “The C Programming Language” by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie for some light reading. Who better to learn the nuances of the most ubiquitous programming language on Earth than the people who created it? I’ve already gotten more familiar with pointers, which is always a good thing in any programming language.

There have also been a number of new developments in our project. First, we decided to give our group project a name with a bit more creativity than “Group 3.” Our group is now the GPU-Parallelized Irradiated Environment Simulator (G-PIES) Team. We already have two very, very early prototypes for both a Cluster Dynamic model, created by Sean Siders, and an Object-Kinetic Monte Carlo model, created by Mykola Balakin. Neither have any GPU parallelization implemented yet, but they aren’t meant for that. These models are our proofs of concept, our sanity checks, to make sure we properly understand the problem that we are being asked to solve.

I myself am currently researching how to implement a Molecular Dynamic model. Granted, my work keeps me busy, but hopefully I will have something to present soon. One of the best things about this project is that the problem is very well documented with plenty of research materials to draw from in our designs!

On a completely unrelated note, my project member Sean Siders pointed out to me that the SNES Special Edition New Nintendo 3DS XL system is now reaching prices of around $1,000 and higher. My investment is beginning to pay off!

I am delighted and excited to announce that I, and three other lucky computer science students (Sean Siders, Keifer Snedeker, and Mykola Balakin), were assigned to work on a fascinating project with Dr. Tianyi: GPU Based Modeling of Material Degradation Inside of a Nuclear Reactor.

I will be the first to admit, the title of this project isn’t exactly clear or descriptive, but I shall attempt to clarify. The goal of our project is to create a model to predict the degradation of a material as it is irradiated.

As the project’s description page explains, “such models essentially simulate the material degradation process by tracking the evolution of many many elements inside of the material over time. These elements could be atoms inside of the material, or defects created by irradiation. Traditionally, such models are challenging to run because of the large amount of elements that must be considered. However, with the amazing parallel computing capabilities of GPU, breakthroughs are expected in realizing such models in a more accurate manner by representing more physical details.”

As for the more specific details of the implementation of this type of model, I already have a few ideas on how to use CUDA to simulate this situation, but my team and I will need to gather more specifics on the exact problem to be solved. Our meeting with Dr. Tianyi will happen tomorrow, so we’ll have a better idea where to start researching this problem then.

For some more in-depth information about the scope of this problem, here is an article that Dr. Tianyi found that explains further: Stochastic Cluster Dynamics Simulations of Irradiated Materials