Physics 555B: Advanced Computational Physics: Course News


This document will be updated throughout the course; entries are in reverse chronological order.

Tuesday, April 3, 11:30 AM

1) CLASS ON THURSDAY, APRIL 5 IS CANCELLED

2) THE TERM PROJECT PRESENTATION IS AS FOLLOWS

TUESDAY APRIL 10
  1. Robert Kehoe
  2. Jason Rowe
  3. Peter McNeeley
  4. Kevin Mitchell
  5. Marc Raiser
THURSDAY APRIL 12
  1. Dominic Marchand
  2. Chris Cameron
  3. Ben Gutierrez
  4. Daniel Mazur
  5. Nahid Jetha
Swaps in the schedule may be arranged via mutual consent of the parties involved.  Please inform the instructor of any such swaps.

3) NOTES/GUIDELINES FOR PRESENTATIONS
  1. Presentations are to be 10 minutes talk + 5 minutes for questions (roughly, but total time will have to be kept close to 15 minutes per presentation in order for us to get through them all).
  2. Presentations will have a minimal evaluative component, and need not be anything "fancy"; e.g. you are free to use the whiteboard or overhead projector should you so wish.  The main purpose of the presentation is for you to give a brief overview of your project for the edification of your classmates, as well as the instructor.
  3. Please let the instructor know:
    1. If you intend to use a laptop and LCD projector
    2. If you will require a laptop. IMPORTANT:  If you will need a laptop, you must also make arrangements to transfer your presentation to the instructor's laptop, either via a memory stick (in which case the transfer can be done at presentation time), or via other means (in which case details of the transfer will need to be worked out before the presentation date.
Contact the instructor should you have any questions/concerns about your presentation.

Wednesday, March 28, 11:30 AM

An updated version of the second homework that. modulo typos, is now complete and final is available HERE.  This version differs from the last in that problem 2a) has now been specified.

Monday, March 26, 5:30 PM

An updated version of the second homework that now contains the third question (in its entirety) is available HERE.  The second question is still incomplete vis a vis the specific numerical experiment that is to be perfomed.

Thursday, March 22, 1:00 PM

As per my earlier e-mail, Robert has pointed out another, more significant error in the Homework 2 handout.  Specifically, the expression for the exact solution for a "particle in a box" (currently, equation (32)), had a sign error in the "complex exponential", i.e.

     exp( i (m pi)^2 t ) ...

should have (and now does) read

     exp(  -i (m pi)i^2 t ) ...

Also, in light of what I heard Robert mention to his classmates, please note that the "bare" expressions for the initial data/exact solution are unnormalized, so if you do use the exact solution (32), that solution will subsequently have to be norrmalized, using, for example, the instructor-supplied routine psi_normalize. .

An updated version of the homework is available HERE

Tuesday, March 13, 11:30 AM

Dominic has pointed out a typo in the first question of the second homework, on the second page of the handout.

Specifically, the phrase

    ... and for 0 <= t <= 0.5, will return ...

should be replaced with

    .... and for 0 <= t <= 0.25, will return ...

An updated version of the homework is available HERE

Tuesday, March 13, 9:00 AM

An updated version of Homework 2 is now available for download HERE.  This version is still incomplete, but will allow you to get working on the second of the three problems in the assignment.

Friday, March 2, 5:30 PM

A preliminary version of Homework 2 is now available for download HERE.  Note that this version contains only the first of the three problems that will eventually constitute the assignment.  Updated versions containing the other questions will be posted as they become available.

Tuesday, February 6, 11:45 AM

It has been pointed out that in the first question on Homework 1, I did not explicitly state that all of the finite difference approximations, including the O(h^4) approximations to the first and second derivatives are to be CENTRED.  My apologies for the omission, and for the confusion and/or extra work it has caused.

The homework handout has been updated accordingly.

Thursday, January 18, 8:45 PM

Regular emacs as opposed to xemacs has been installed on the lnx machines. 

Additionally links to both the LAPACK and BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) source code directoies have been added to the course Notes page.

Also note that lnx[123] is "unixese" for the three distinct lnx machines

  • lnx1.physics.ubc.ca
  • lnx2.physics.ubc.ca
  • lnx3.physics.ubc.ca

I apologize for any confusion this notation may have caused, but, on the other hand, I suspect that lack of confusion on this issue is highly correlated with the degree to which the Unix Notes have been studied :-)

Tuesday, January 16, 1:30 PM

The following accounts have now been created on the lnx[123].physics.ubc.ca machines:

   nahid, kehoe, marchand, mazur, petermc, rpatters, raiser

With one exception (kehoe) the passwords for these accounts should be identical to the corresponding accounts on physics.ubc.ca. Mr Kehoe, your account on physics has expired, so you should visit Mary Ann Potts to have it reinstated, and then send me mail when you have done so.

All students who have registered for the course should now have accounts on lnx[123].  Let me know if you have any problems logging in to those machines, either at the console, or via ssh.

Also note that on your lnx accounts I have created a directory public_html. If you create the HTML file index.html, within that directory, you will be able to access said file via the STUDENT PAGES link from the course home page.  I recommend that you use Composer (part of the Mozilla Web browser) or some other WYSIWYG HTML-editor to create and maintain your Web page(s).

Thursday, January 3, 2:30 PM

Our first class is scheduled for 9:30 AM, TUESDAY, JANUARY 9, 2007 in HENNINGS 309B(NOTE THE ROOM!!)

You should be able to register for the course online, selecting PHYS 555B, section 206.

Maintained by choptuik@physics.ubc.ca. Supported by CIAR, NSERC, CFI, BCKDF and UBC