Fall Kickoff 2014

Wednesday at 4pm in 2150 Shattuck, Suite 230.

Attending

• Kelly Rowland
• Madicken Munk
• Ross Barnowski
• Daniel Wooten
• Russell
• Sven
• Massimiliano Fratoni
• Denia Djokic
• Katy Huff

Discussion: Upcoming Topics

The Berkeley chapter of the Hacker Within scientific computing group (formerly known as the Berkeley NE computational methods group) will be kicking off the fall 2014 semester on Wednesday, August 27th, from 4pm-6pm.

The goal of this meeting was to plan the rest of the semester’s meetings. The time, frequency, and content of the upcoming semester’s meetings we all up for discussion. In particular, we were able to brainstorm a possible suite of software tools, resources, and practices to discuss this upcoming semester. If you have an idea, but didn’t make it to the meeting, reply on the [UCB hackerwithin listhost][listhost].

Brainstorming Computational Topics

We thought of a number of cool things we’d like to talk about this semester.

• LaTeX * Resumes
• PyNE * Live build (Kelly)
• Bash
• Ubuntu install and dual boot
• Fun hacky things * Doxygen * Cmake
• Plotting * Matplotlib, yt * gnuplot * 3D options * Rules * how to make a good plot * animations (imagemagick)
• Presentation rules * tools * rules * Pre-ANS
• Vectorized/Matrix computing * formulating your problem correctly * Andy’s diffusion example
• Web tools (scraping, python urllib, wget)
• Extending Python * cython, C/API, boost.python
• Threading (multiprocessing, ZMQ)

Bootcamp Series Ideas

Professor Fratoni has an excellent idea for embedding a seminar for neutronics specific toolsets into this general computational seminar. The topics will vary and will be the subject of discussion during the September 3rd meeting.

• Tools - Serpent - MCNP - ORIGEN - MOCUP - MOOSE
• Data/Methods
• Tricks ‘n tips
• Overviews & Comparison
• Increase interactivity, project/tutorial focused
• Group attendees by interest/skill-level

General thoughts

• Tutorial code should be posted on github prior to presentation
• Reminders should be sent the day before the meeting
• Also, the listhost reminders should go out to ne-grads for a while
• Having the meetings in the Doe Library BIDS space seems feasible.

Meeting Structure ideas

1st hour -> nuclear tools seminar 1:00 - 1:45 -> computing skillz 1:45 - people burn out -> lightning/hanging out

Upcoming Talks

1. Bash (Katy)
2. Latex/resumes (Katy-resumes), (Laurence, Rachel for general Latex?)
3. PyNE (Kelly)

Ordering of talks - Nuclear series

1. Max overview of what tools to use when
2. … figure out from Max’s talk