Beats of Bratislava

First Impressions

Here we go, my second official blog post (does this mean I can add blog writing to the skills section of my CV?). I think I’m starting to get the hang of this blog writing stuff (I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know if this is the case). 

I’m far from home but at least Vienna is close

I’ve been in Bratislava for two weeks now so I feel I can write a post about my initial impression of the city.

The general consensus that I got after speaking to some natives of Bratislava was that the city could be fully explored in 2 or 3 days (I guess that means I’m getting a lot of work done over the summer!). But I have to disagree, it seems that everyday there’s something new to see. Below are just some examples of the street performers (who are actually good!) or live music that I’ve seen so far.

In the centre of Bratislava (under St. Michael’s Tower) there’s a zero mile marker that gave me a sudden feeling of being homesick….. But some local gelato from Koun (the best in the city apparently) quickly remedied that!

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There’s also much history to be seen in the city, such as Bratislava Castle, which was destroyed by Napoleon (if you’re not too familiar with Napoleon check out this link, it’s a brief description of him). One of the cannonballs used by Napoleon is actually still lodged in the Old Town Hall.

There’s also varying architecture throughout the city, the most prominent being Communistic. But there are some Gothic structures too, such as St Martin’s Cathedral (which has a giant 150 kg gold crown on its spire).

There’s still more for me to see but at the very worst I can always return home for a decent view..

The view from my room isn’t too shabby

The Fun Stuff

But let’s be honest, you don’t really care about what I’ve getting up to in the city, you want to know what I’ve been doing on my laptop (or more specifically on Aurel, the SAS’s supercomputer). Truthfully, so far not so much (but that should be changing soon…… hopefully!), I’ve been trying to get familiar with the code I’m working with.

It turns out that MPI has already been implemented in the key bottleneck of the code that I’m working with (so I can kick back and relax for the rest of the summer).

There’s a diagonalisation subroutine that must be parallelised, so my first task is to parallelise that (when put like that it sounds so easy). After successfully completing that, I plan on visualising the crystal orbitals of the nanotube being modelled (although I haven’t fully decided how I’m gonna do that yet…).

I guess this update is a bit light on the science, but I’ve been told always leave your audience wanting more. So you’ll have to come back and check out my next post for that.

Until then I leave you with my favourite street performer in Bratislava…

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