Astrophysics
During the period of March-July 2002, I was hired as a research
assistant in the Astrophysics Group at Drexel under the
supervision of Dr. Micheal Vogeley. My task was to assist in the
construction of
a 48 node, 96 processor (1.4 GHz/chip) Beowulf cluster named
"Frinkiac",
and to undertake basic system administration for the system of
computers
in the Astro group. Each node was assembled by hand and software
was
installed and configured on the main node. Preliminary
benchmarking
was undertaken and early estimates of the performance were clocked at
35
GFLOPS. New compilers were later installed to optimize the
performance of the cluster. The Beowulf cluster is used at
Drexel for research
in large scale N-body simulations, simulations of cosmological voids,
and
MHD calculations of the coronal mass ejections.
Soon after the Frinkiac was completed, a Drexel student and friend of
mine
named Henry Winterbottom used it as the primary tool in his senior
thesis
project with the Astro Group. Some animations produced in his
research
while simulating cosmological voids can be found below. More
information
on Henry's thesis project can be found here.
The simulation in red represents mass in a
typical region of the universe. The simulation in green
represents mass within
a void region. This void region is treated as an isolated
universe.
"The above animations exploit the growth
of structure within a typical region of the universe (left hand side)
and a void. We use the linear threshold for collapse (York et. al 2000)
to define regions where galaxies are likely to form. At the beginning
of
the animation, you may notice that the void regions have a larger
number
of galaxies while there are only a few within a typical region of the
universe. This is a result of Newton's law of Gravitation. As the
distance
between individual particles increases, the force between the particles
drops off exponentially. Therefore, at the end of the animation you
will
see that many galaxies have formed in the typical region of the
universe
and growth of structure slows considerably within the void as the
animation progresses." (Winterbottom 1998)
* I would like to thank Dr. Vogely for making my co-op with the Astro
Group possible. I would also like to thank Henry Winterbottom for
allowing me
to use some of his animations and captions. These serve to provide an
example of the kind of research being conducted using the Frinkiac.
