Poster from this summer's internship

As part of my summer internship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory I'll be presenting the following poster tomorrow:

di·ver·tisse·ment

View Mines Rd to Big Basin in a larger map

Friday Musings

First, Mumford & Son's "Little Lion Man" is amazing.  Listen.  Purchase.  Bonus points for accidentally starting two or more copies and noticing it sounds excellent in a round.  Found it on thesixtyone.com, which is a great source for day-to-day working music and occasionally emits gems like this one.

Second, the Richtmyer-Meshkov setup I've been mucking with for two days is working. In it, a shock wave interacts with a perturbed, constant pressure interface between two different densities (details). Courtesy of gnuplot and gifsicle, here's an animated gif showing density evolution for a problem that's periodic in y and reflective at both x boundaries (click to view animation, 3.2M):

Just a roll up?

The reflective condition at the left boundary causes a re-reshock, which isn't usually what folks are interested in for these problems.  I'm not entirely sure how to enforce a strict inflow condition for compressible simulations like these-- presumably such an inflow condition would eat the outgoing characteristics and stop the re-reshock seen here.

Glam Shot

Today at LLNL I was involved in some photos for a story on the summer students at ISCR:

Daniel from Ghana, Hilary from Dallas, and me

The screen images are from the 2D WENO-based code I've been revising to investigate RANS modeling of Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities with Dr. Oleg Schilling. As a bit of nerd sniping, I made sure Trac, VIM's NERD tree, and some Mathematica reproducing classic results from Roe's JCP 1981 paper were clearly visible.

Unrelated, today I also had a couple of beers with Ondřej Čertík of sympy and theoretical physics fame. Unbelievably swell guy— easily one of the smartest one or two people with whom I've ever shared a brew.

Update: Entertainingly, in the related story the lab released, the caption shows me as a "Livermore scientist".