Cheeky ****!
Always a cracking night, but I'm worried some of these OCUKers might not have it in them to keep up (especially with all those Duuble JD Cokes)
I just skim read some of the blog in your sig and noticed that you're supervised by a certain Scotsman by the name of Stewart. I know him well, he was my director of studies for three years.
My main supervisor is a Chem Eng'er, but she is also a pro-vice chancellor who knows very little about computational stuff (or computers in general) so Stewart is my main contact and all-round knowledgeable guy. My desk is just opposite to his office, and I'm supervising a couple of MEng students with him this coming year in the area of combustion. Makes me a little unpopular with the Chem Eng'ers as I work in Engineering and do tutoring for their students! If he was your DoS were you at Selwyn College?
He's my second supervisor
Really nice guy, very funny too. My other supervisor tells me that I will never grow a beard as perfect as his though
Mid week beers are dangerous, I'm out with Maersk lot tomorrow
KaHn
In that case I know who you are. I'm one of those annoying guys who occasionally uses the expensive workstations right next to your desk in the Ashby lab.
Yeah I was at Selwyn, I just graduated in July.
I knew I had seen OcUK on the monitors next to me - I recognised the blue immediately! How did your presentations go for the eco-racing stuff? I remember seeing a few papers on the desk for some slides and walking past the meeting room with what looked like the presentations from the undergrads, but I was on my way for tea so didn't stop by!
With the gigantic 32" monitors? I always seem annoyed because the 22" Dell screen just doesn't cut it (and my code never compiles nicely) - the headphones are to provide soothing music
By the way, Stewart mentioned one time that your meshes are very large - I remember seeing a good old fashioned blue screen on one of the cinema screens one morning from a memory leak. Given some of the PCs in the room I always think that my workstation isn't too shabby - it may be a Dell and looks about 5 years old but it's got two Xeons and 12gb of RAM in it. I never use the full amount of RAM though as I don't run FLUENT
edit/ p.s. the workstation on the right sounds like you have one of the old GeForce FX series in it - when it gets turned on I always think the cleaner is coming round with the hoover!
The meshes we use a bloody massive. I'm not a fluids guy so I couldn't say the exact size but I heard it was taking hours and hours to just generate a mesh that'd run. Most of the simulations got farmed out to the Intel cluster in Swindon - apparently a few hundred cores is better than a couple of Xeons for that kind of thing!
I'm on the electrical team so use the big screens for coding, PCB layouts and a bit of CAD design. If you saw any battery cells or folded sheet metal lying around there's a good chance I was responsible.
/edit: yes the workstation on the right is a nightmare. I had to laugh at the "sorry that this machine is so loud" sign that Tom put up.
Well I now know who was worse off, has your sink recovered?
I remember the whole night
Indeed - FLUENT itself isn't great at parallelising either unfortunately. The code I run is one we've brewed up at the Ashby labs and runs anywhere between 5-10 times faster than FLUENT . . . when running in serial mode too! Chem Eng is good for their cluster as it's a small department so there's not much competition for computational time. My supervisor essentially bought the cluster too (grants - she is one of the top people at the EPSRC), so I get priority on it
The sign was excellent, but I liked the hammer with "emergency" (or whatever it was - forgotten!) written on it too. Probably would have fixed the noise on that computer!
I think the hammer's label was "OFF SWITCH", which is typical of the 2009 team's approach to engineering, and most of our headaches this year.
Both, in a manner of speaking. I'm off to Australia in a few weeks with the Eco Racing guys - the race is in October. Then I start a job in the science park in December. Not sure I really want to start doing real work, but the lure of having weekends and evenings actually free was too great.
)
Good luck with the race and have a good time in Oz - do the Ashby labs proud! (and hopefully prove that CFD isn't a waste of time/resources
