I know many of you are wondering why I’ve not been blogging. Well, probably not many of you – maybe not even anybody – but I’ll pretend, for the sake of my sanity, that there is somebody out there. Unfortunately, it turns out that doing a PhD encroaches on your personal time rather more drastically than is advertised on the shiny brochures. Who would have thought?

Anyway, my research involves studying pipe flow in long pipes and I regularly run simulations using 64 (or more) processors. If you look at the lovely picture, that’s a figure I recently produced for an abstract – it shows the streamwise vorticity field in a long-ish pipe. And it just takes a lot of time figuring out the rather complicated program that I use (called semtex – great name).

Well, that’s not the only reason for my lack of bloggyness. On Tuesday I got another new toy – a shiny, super-duper 8-core Mac Pro. Hopefully anybody that knows of me understands that I am one of those annoying Apple fanbois. Well, if they don’t, then they will soon because this machine is stupendously fast.

The reason? I need something a bit more beefy. That figure took about a day to come up with because my work computer is pretty slow and my laptop is much faster. Also, 8-cores is not too unreasonable for some shorter pipe length simulations.

Anyhow. The blog has suffered, as has my photoblog and photography in general. The good news however, is that I have a lot more free time now, and with a faster computer Lightroom should run a buttload quicker. So be ready for some updates soon.

9:55 am | Posted in Academia, Maths, PhD 2 Comments »