Engineering

A case study in choosing algorithms

Sunday, Aug 14, 2016 | 3 min read
Categories: Engineering, Physics,
Tags: Algorithms,

This past year, I have been crunching data from dark matter simulations. Data size can get pretty large when it comes to scientific computing. As I write this post, I have a script running on 3.8 TB (that’s right – 3,700 gigabytes) of cosmic particles. At these levels one starts thinking about parallelizing computations. And therein lay my dilemma and a soon to be learned lesson.

Talking With Satellites

Wednesday, Oct 14, 2015 | 1 min read
Categories: Engineering, Personal,
This year I am leading a senior design team in developing a software defined radio that can talk with a satellite that Vanderbilt just launched. Compared to a normal radio, an SDR has most of the signal processing functions implemented virtually. This means that it can change its operation on the fly. An interesting application of SDRs is cognitive radio: that is, radios communicating with other radios in their vicinity and adjusting their frequencies to maximize their use of the bandwidth.