Weekly plans and update for week 46

Dear all, we hope you are staying healthy.

Concerning the in-person labs tomorrow and Friday we will try to keep these open, but would like to recommend that you consider wearing a face mask if possible. We should also respect proper social distancing. The digital labs will run as normal (Thursday 4-6pm and Friday 2-4pm) but if there is interest we will keep them open from 10am till 6pm both days. In case of new recommendations, we will most likely switch to digital labs for the rest of the semester (last two weeks, week 47 and 48).

We will also offer digital labs (Thursdays ) in week 49 and 50 before. 

Last week we discussed in detail project 4 but did not start  with parallelization techniques.

We thought of making a video of this but decided rather to use the first lecture tomorrow (Thursday) to discuss how one can parallelize project 4 and get more statistics. 

The parallelization material is presented in the slides at http://compphysics.github.io/ComputationalPhysics/doc/pub/codeoptimization/html/codeoptimization-reveal.html, starting from slide 51 and out. We will discuss MPI and OpenMP as ways to parallelize our code for project 4. 

Your PCs/Laptops come typically with 2-4 cores. You can access more if you want. In case you wish to, we would like to recommend using our local Abel cluster. To get started see the instructions at https://www.mn.uio.no/fysikk/english/people/adm/almarin/ccse-servers.html

Else, on Friday we will discuss random number generators and topics from statistics like the central limit theorem. This is discussed in section 11.3 of the lectures and the introductory Monte Carlo slides, see http://compphysics.github.io/ComputationalPhysics/doc/pub/mcint/html/mcint-reveal.html . If we get time, we may discuss Monte Carlo methods applied to quantum mechanical systems, in particular how we could solve project 2 using Monte Carlo methods.

Next week we start with partial differential equations and that will keep us busy till the end of the semester. The last lecture is November 27.

Best wishes to you all and stay healthy,

Anders, Aksel, Kaspara, Maria, Morten, Rene and Sebastian