Ernest N. Mamikonyan

Current Research

Astrophysical N-body simulations

Intermediate-mass black holes

Free Software

cd2mp3

A shell script to easily "rip" audio CDs to MP3 files with correct title, artist, etc. information in the header and without the use of any version of the insulting operating system. This is particularly convenient for people with various portable music players, such as the iPod that don't run the required software, i.e., iTunes in this case. It drives Cdda2Wav and LAME to extract the audio stream from the media and then encode it.

Man

My replacement for the standard Unix man(1) program. This is a shell script that does all the useful things the original does only faster and without the overhead of cat pages, which I consider utterly useless.

Psh/Pcp

A shell script to facilitate communication on a Beowulf cluster. It can use RSH, SSH, or any compatible remote execution application as the back-end. It takes particular care in reporting output and errors correctly, a common problem with simpler versions.

Clean

A small shell script that deletes temporary and backup files commonly left over by programs like Emacs and TeX. It behaves intelligently (most of the time) and can traverse arbitrary directory trees fairly efficiently. Honestly, however, the need for any such program can be almost entirely eliminated by configuring your editors to backup to a designated directory. For Emacs, the necessary piece of ELisp is (setq backup-directory-alist (quote (("" . "/home/ernest/.backup")))); if you also use nano, use set backupdir "/home/ernest/.backup" (with the proper filename substituted, of course).

mpg2wav

Uses mpg123 or the clone, mpg321, to decode MPEG audio files to WAV format; this is particularly useful when creating audio CDs from MP3 files. It supports a full range of operations on files as well as directories and can be expected to act intelligently and efficiently.

Mon

System monitor for a Beowulf cluster with a terminal, Ncurses-based, interface suitable for interactive viewing as well as a text interface more appropriate for monitoring parallel batch jobs. Currently, it requires the 2.4 series kernel, but I can be persuaded to bring the code up-to-date with the 2.6 series.

Projects and Initiatives

MODEST/MANYBODY

An umbrella website for various activities related to simulation and visualization of stellar systems. In particular, it hosts the webpage for the MODEST project, a loose collaboration between researchers in stellar dynamics, stellar evolution, and stellar hydrodynamics, as well as the MANYBODY website, dedicated to stellar dynamics, that offers several state-of-the-art software environments for evolution and visualization of dense stellar systems.

Starlab

A star cluster evolution package written by Piet Hut, Steve McMillan, Jun Makino, and Simon Portegies Zwart. It features two main components, Kira, a dynamical integrator with a fourth-order Hermite scheme and individual, adaptive time steps, and SeBa, a stellar and binary evolution module based on the latest stellar evolution recipes.

StarCluster

Suite of data reduction and analysis tools together with a C++ Gnuplot API written by yours truly. Interfacing with Starlab, it offers the user many powerful yet quick manipulations of large quantities of data.

BASIN

A rather ambitious project to create an extensive, parallel data analysis and visualization environment for astrophysical research. Its distinguishing features are the portability to various architectures, including massively parallel Beowulf clusters, the ability to manipulate both, numerical as well as symbolic data, and the incorporation of many known algorithms and open-source software packages.

Interests and Hobbies