Nherm

Hi! I'm nherm! Welcome to my user page!

A computing engineer lost in a physics world

I'm a computing engineer from Universidad de Magallanes, located in a very very far city called Punta Arenas, in the southern part of (say, in the end of) Chile.

At the end of my studies I worked with discrete-event simulations using parallel protocols and libraries, so I have some experience with Paderborn University BSP Library (the PUB-Library)and MPI (MPICH), using a cluster of PCs. I earned my grad at Jan. 2003 presenting a dissertation titled: Implementating YAWNS synchronization protocol and a interface with a discrete event framework simulation. Running parallel programs using MPI is still one of my favorite tasks to do...

Also, as a way to finance my studies, I started to work at the space physics lab in my university (I was surprised there was a space physics lab! I think most of the students there aren't aware its existance), mostly doing programs for to calculate some equations over observational data, working with (then strange) geophysical indexes, and retrieving data from a station near the campus, from an ancient computer connected to a black plastic thing.

Later, I learned that the "black plastic think" was a magnetometer, and that some of these indexes were related to currents and belts of radiation around the Earth ("Currents above the Earth? But I thought the space was empty!"). My interest about space physics started to grow...

The beginning of the end

Exactly the Sept. 11th of 2001 was offered to me the possibility to continue studying a master degree in the space physics area. It was necessary two years of fighting (one year to earn my engineer grade, another to fight against chilean bureaucracy) for to get accepted in the postgrade program for master degree at INPE, located in São José dos Campos, Brazil. Now I'm working with numerical simulations of wave-wave interactions in plasmas, and using chaos theory to analyze the temporal wave dynamics.

And yes, sometimes I implement those numerical simulations using MPI, Did I mention that running parallel programs is one of my favorite task to do? I'm sure I did :)

My interests

Things that I can discuss

• Computing Science in general.

• Space physics: Plasma waves, wave-wave interactions and instabilities

• Chaos theory

Topics where generally I listen more than discuss

• Astrophysics and Cosmology