Several months have passed since I last wrote a research log entry.  I should probably write these a bit more frequently.  Much has happened since the previous entry!

• My HST Cycle 19 Theory proposal was accepted and all of requested funding has been provided!
• I became the first physics graduate student at UCR to be an instructor for a course (rather than just a teaching assistant). I taught Physics 40A during the summer session.
• I got married!
• I finished writing my first paper.  The paper is still being reviewed as I write this, so it’s technically not finished because it hasn’t been revised, resubmitted, and accepted for publication yet.
• I compiled P-GADGET-2 and ran several small simulations on Crunch.
• I’ve written a code in C++ to read, analyze, manipulate, and output GADGET-2 snapshot files. The code is very basic at the moment, but it should be mostly finished in a few months. I’ll use this code for the non-Sunrise component of my thesis project. I plan to write another research log entry describing the first application of the code: quadratic spline interpolation of snapshot files for purposes of making animations.
• I’ve built a GADGET-aware version of IFrIT.  This was somewhat more time-consuming than it should have been since there were no explicit instructions on how to build the GADGET plugin into IFrIT. I also managed to get SPLASH to read and analyze / visualize my GADGET-2 snapshots.  I still haven’t managed to get Splotch to read my snapshot format though…I’m going to move on to working with Sunrise now.  I’ve heard that successfully building Sunrise takes some effort.
• I’ve started reviewing the core of theoretical physics and I’ve finally started learning some elementary particle physics / quantum field theory.

For the next few weeks, I’ll likely be practicing using Sunrise, writing code, and benchmarking GADGET-2 and Sunrise with various compilers and with different compiler optimization flags. I’m testing GCC 4.4 & 4.6 as well as the latest versions of the Open64, EKOPath, LLVM, Intel, and Oracle compilers. The video below shows the results of the highest resolution simulation that I’ve performed. The video shows the evolution of the stars and gas during the simulation from two different view-points.  The AGN feedback is quite obvious. I’ve also made animations of the evolution of the dark matter during the simulation; they look exactly like the dissipationless mergers that I analyzed in my qualifier project and first paper.

Tags: animation, GADGET

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