On Wednesday I presented a poster on the work I did over the summer at Lawrence Livermore at a Materials Day poster presentation. Like usual, nobody was interested in my poster once they realized it was about math and involved Green’s function, and most people didn’t seem to understand the significance of reducing a O(N logN) algorithm to O(N). I also realized that it’s impossible for a modeling poster to every win any awards (except at modeling conferences, of course) because when everyone else is describing how they want to stop global warming by putting viruses on transparent conducting bio-nano-spheres or something, you’re talking about math. And not that my poster was really award-worthy to begin with.

Yesterday I went on a special tour of BlueGene/L and Purple, which are the fastest and third fastest supercomputers in the world. I saw several others as well. These are classified computers, so I was lucky to be able to see them because they are in a high security facility. They are amazing – BlueGene/L has 131,072 processors!