Side Projects
AstroWiki
Astrowiki is a set of living notes I created and now co-maintain with Alex Yelland (MIT) on much of astrophysics, intended to supplement study for the MIT astrophysics division oral qualification exam, currently referred to as "the 168". Pictured is a graphical representation of most of the original wiki. The current website hosts astrowiki version 2 which was almost entirely written by Alex, based upon the original wiki and various sets of notes provided by our peers.
Practical Bayesian Sampling in Python and Julia
In this project, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are implemented in both Python and Julia and benchmarked in both serial and parallel via a parameter fitting problem. Both the user experience of implementing and using these algorithms and the raw computational performance are considered in order to form a recommendation to young scientists interested in MCMC, in particular those with existing experience in Python. It is found that MCMC algorithms run in Julia on a single core of a consumer laptop outperform almost identical implementations (and the popular package emcee) in python run on hundreds of cores on a supercomputing cluster. Report and code here