Belgrade Broadcast

It has been a great first week here in Belgrade, full of learning, meeting fascinating people and seeing beautiful sights. We are working here in the Institute of Physics Belgrade(IPB). Onur is looking at the Visualisation of electron-phonon coupling in organic semiconducting materials while I am studying the Calculation and visualization of the electronic structure of C60 with GPAW.

We have been given a warm welcome to Serbia by everyone here. On arrival, we were treated to a traditional Serbian meal on the banks of the River Danube by our site co-ordinator, Antun Balaž. This was followed by a small party at IPB the next day. Everyone here has been very friendly and willing to give advice and discuss their research with us.

Dinner by the Danube

We were also given a tour of the facilities here at IPB, which are impressive to say the least. The supercomputer has its own room, filled with rows and rows of machines and four large air conditioners to keep them cool. It is made of 84 nodes, each of which contains two quad-core 2.33 GHz processors with 8GB of RAM. For anyone who doesn’t know: that’s a lot. The cluster also has 50 TB of storage space available. (Again, that’s a lot.) We were also shown some of the equipment and ongoing experiments in the labs here (see pictures below).

On Sunday, Onur and I (along with Nicolas who was visiting from Budapest) visted Avala Tower with a couple of our colleagues at IPB. Avala Tower is the tallest tower  in the Balkan region and boasts an incredible view of Belgrade and the surrounding countryside. The surrounding area consists of large tracts of woodland and was the setting for a lovely afternoon meal and walk. We also had a chance to visit Kalemegdan Park, which is the largest public park in Belgrade. It is the setting for many attractions such as Belgrade Fortress, a military museum and a large open-air concert venue. The fortress has great historical significance as the settlement that would eventually become Belgrade was built around the original fortification.

The view from Avala Tower

Avala Tower

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near Avala Tower

Cannons outside the military museum

In other news, the weather continues to be excruciatingly hot, so if I don’t write any more posts you’ll know it’s because I got sunstroke. Hopefully next time I’ll be able to write more next time about my project, so be sure to read next time for that.