I had the pleasure of visiting Los Alamos last week to give the Astrophysics Distinguished Seminar at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. First time in New Mexico, actually. What a beautiful state!
It was great to interact with the folks at the Center for Nonlinear Studies: Alejandro, Jonah, Hyun, Ben, and many others. Thank you for the hospitality and the green chili!
I gave the Data Seminar at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at LBL. My first time there. What a beautiful center, what powerful high-performance computing infrastructure. And what a view of the Bay Area!
I presented my group’s work on applying different machine learning methods to advance our understanding of black holes, including black hole weather forecasting with AI. I am particularly excited about the transformative potential of neural operators for fluid dynamics, and its repercussions for black hole studies.
There were several interesting discussions on the similarities between Earth weather and black hole weather (very little, but there is some common physics), on neural operators, and ideas for follow-up studies with the data team. The talk is now available on Youtube.
After the talk, I visited the Perlmutter GPU cluster, which is surprisingly silent. Thanks, liquid cooling. And met by chance over lunch the legend Fernando Perez, creator of Jupyter.
Many thanks to Steve Farrell for being such a wonderful host.
Last December I gave a seminar with an overview of the my group’s research on gamma-ray astronomy and our investigations of low-luminosity active galactic nuclei and Sagittarius A* using the Fermi Gamma-ray Observatory. Please follow the link below for the video.
This presentation was a part of the Reuven Opher Workshop, in honor of Reuven Opher who passed away in 2020.
Do androids dream of electric black holes?
Black holes accrete gas from their surroundings in a chaotic, turbulent manner. This colloquium will describe the pilot application of deep learning for black hole weather forecasting. Our early results indicate that black hole simulations can benefit tremendously from AI. Along the way, I will explain the difference between artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and deep learning and why the scientific community is so excited about these topics.
Below are the slides from my presentation, given in late 2021.
No dia 29 de Outubro, dei uma palestra online no evento Física em Casa, organizado pelas amigas do ICTP SAIFR, onde descrevi porque Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez e Reinhard Genzel ganharam o Prêmio Nobel da física de 2020, e comentei sobre a importância do feito.
Confira o vídeo integral da palestra no youtube logo abaixo. A palestra inicia em t=5:12.
Em 23 de Setembro, eu dei a palestra “A nova era de ouro dos buracos negros” na ocasião do evento Convite à Física, organizado pelos amigos do IF USP.
Os anos 60 foram os anos dourados da pesquisa teórica sobre buracos negros, onde nomes como Roger Penrose e Stephen Hawking elevaram a nossa compreensão física destes estranhos astros a um outro patamar. Neste convite à física, argumentei que entramos em 2009 numa segunda e empolgante era de ouro da pesquisa em buracos negros, impulsionada desta vez por avanços empíricos. Quais são as principais descobertas da nova astronomia de buracos negros? E o que vem pela frente?
A palestra inicia em t=3:10.
Here are the slides from my presentation from late 2019 giving an overview of how GPUs can accelerate scientific code, with CUDA and OpenACC. Examples mostly in hydrodynamics simulations in the context of astrophysics.
Abstract: Graphics processing units (GPUs) aren’t just of interest to gamers and cryptocurrency miners. Increasingly, they’re being used to turbocharge academic research, too. GPUs provide massive parallelism enabling one to perform computations on a basic computer that until very recently required a supercomputer. I will describe how GPUs can be leveraged to dramatically accelerate scientific calculations. I will also give an overview of recent applications of GPUs to astrophysical simulations, with a particular focus on radiative transfer in curved spacetimes and (magneto)hydrodynamics simulations of black hole accretion.
Neste sábado, primeiro de Junho, dei uma apresentação no evento TEDx Santos sobre—surprise, surprise—buracos negros. Mais especificamente, a primeira imagem de um buraco negro, revelada no dia 11 de Abril de 2019. Foi uma experiência interessante e única.
O evento foi no belíssimo Teatro Guarany, um prédio histórico construído na época em que Santos experimentava o boom do café paulista.
Não tenho ainda previsão de quando o vídeo da palestra será disponibilizado online, devido a alguns problemas técnicos que a equipe de gravação encontrou. Espero que logo!
O vídeo da apresentação finalmente foi disponibilizado online no site da TED.
I am thrilled to share the success of the GPU Computing workshop, which took place from October 30th to November 1st at USP. As the chair of this event, I had the incredible opportunity to witness firsthand the enthusiasm and engagement from students, faculty, and researchers at the University of São Paulo.
The workshop was designed to harness the power of massively accelerated computing, and it was extremely productive. Participants delved into the latest advancements in GPU technology, explored practical applications, and engaged in hands-on sessions that demonstrated the transformative potential of GPU computing across various fields.
It was inspiring to see the collaborative spirit and the eagerness to learn and innovate. I am confident that this event has sparked new ideas and research directions that will benefit our academic community.
Thank you to everyone who participated and contributed to making this workshop a success. I look forward to seeing the exciting developments that will emerge from our collective efforts in GPU computing.
Last Thursday, me and Roderik Overzier (ON) gave a talk targeted at graduate students with a walkthrough on the process of applying for postdocs. The slides of the presentation are available here.
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