Jeremy McMinis “I love being a graduate student studying physics. I have some pressure to produce results, but how I do so is up to me. I get to work whenever I want on problems that are interesting to me. I have a boss, my advisor, but they provide oversight and guidance, not micro-managing. It's a low pay, low responsibility, high intellectual reward job. Of course the plan is to be a professor one day, and things will change then. For now I think it is pretty much the perfect job.”

Biography Born and raised in Panama City Florida First degree was a BA in Economics from New College in Florida Moved to San Diego and then Ann Arbor MI where he went back to school and got a BS from Eastern Michigan in Physics Accepted into graduate program at the University of Illinois where he is currently working towards his PhD and received his Master’s Degree Second time participating in Adopt-A-Physicist

Hobbies Rock climbing Chess Repairing cars Disk golf Running Swimming Card/Board games Table Tennis

Topics of Discussion Jeremy's work Jeremy's employer Jeremy's background Quantum Monte Carlo The Kraken

Employer University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign “Working at a national lab or at a research university is something few people have the opportunity to do. It is a great place to work if you love doing physics, solving problems, and spending time around intelligent and motivated people.” Private/Government funded research Loomis Laboratory UIUC Department of physics

What does Jeremy do? Computational Physics A: “I look forward to a cup of coffee and talking to the other people in my lab. I enjoy coding, but I do most of that at home. When I am at work I get to opportunity to talk to other people about their projects and the progress they are making.” Q: When you go to work, what is the one thing you look forward to doing? Computational Physics Performs calculations on supercomputers Thinks about computational algorithms Writes computer code Calculates properties of materials Jeremy is a major contributor to the open source quantum Monte Carlo code QMCPACK

The Kraken Jeremy does computations on the Kraken and Jaguar 3rd largest supercomputer in the world Calculatio ns require a supercom puter because they use about 120,000 CPU's for 4-6 hours which is about 2400- 500K hours per calculatio n located at Oak Ridge National Laboratori es Imagine 200,000 desktop computer' s networked together! 129 TB of compute memory A 3.3 PB raw parallel file system of disk storage for scratch space (2.4 PB available) 8,256 compute nodes System Specifications Cray Linux Environment (CLE) 2.2 A peak performance of 1.03 PetaFLOP 99,072 compute cores

Quantum Monte Carlo Method of calculations http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7o Gc Method of calculations Method is flexible and can be modified to address many types of problems For instance, calculating the energy of liquid water and solid water can determine where it freezes This technique uses random numbers to calculate properties of solids, liquids, or gases

Minecraft Q: Does the Kraken have gaming capabilities? A: “Hah! I think you could play any Linux game on Kraken. Maybe Minecraft, Tuxracer, or a text based game could be played on it, but you'd have to build it yourself and get it running. I bet you could write a pretty awesome AI for any game you knew the API for (chess, starcraft, Civ, 1st person shooters, etc).” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaMTedT6 P0I

Division of Group Work Joleen Wilhelm Matthew Mahuna Jake Danger Arsenou Mistress of PowerPoint Master of Information Master of Correspondence