The exponential growth of computing power has been a boon to the research that Assistant Professor of Physics Jeffrey Oishi and his students do every day at 乐播传媒.
But supercomputers still can鈥檛 top the power of the human mind to ask the right research questions, he says.
Oishi recalls what one of his college professors, the famed computational scientist David Keyes, once said in class. 鈥淗e said he’d rather have today’s algorithms on yesterday’s computers than yesterday’s algorithms on today’s computers.鈥�
In other words, even with the exponential growth of computing power, 鈥渉ow we phrase our ideas and problems to the computer鈥� is what matters, Oishi says. 鈥淗ow we phrase our questions can radically change results by a much larger factor鈥� than any increase in computing power.
For example, just yesterday, Oishi and a , found a way to solve a problem 2,000 times faster 鈥� on the same computer 鈥� simply by changing the mathematical formula slightly.鈥�
For Oishi and the , 鈥渢hat鈥檚 where the real excitement comes 鈥攊n the ideas and ways of looking at problems.鈥�
Oishi is a computational physicist. His lab, , seeks to understand highly complex systems 鈥渢hat are far from equilibrium,鈥� meaning that 鈥渢here’s a lot of energy flowing through them. The classic examples for me are fluid turbulence in the atmosphere, the oceans, and the stars and their stellar atmospheres.”
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He鈥檚 also looked at smaller-scale problems, like the growth of bacterial biofilms that thrive on surfaces 鈥� such as industrial pipelines and medical devices. 鈥淏iofilms grow and divide and exist in a fluid medium. It鈥檚 one of the biggest problems for hospitals, for example, in intravenous lines.”
The research involves “extremely large supercomputer simulations on national-class facilities at NASA and some of the National Science Foundation centers,鈥� he says. In addition, his students have access to the college鈥檚 high-performance computing cluster. The HPCC is a “workhorse.”
Oishi earned bachelor鈥檚 and doctoral degrees at two universities, Columbia and the University of Virginia. Now he鈥檚 teaching and doing research at 乐播传媒, and he sees the benefits for his students when it comes to doing research at a small liberal arts college.
鈥淎nd, importantly, the students bring value to the research work,鈥� he adds. Last January, a student in his lab, Morgan Baxter 鈥�20, co-authored a scholarly article published in the highly regarded .
The ample opportunities to do research is partly a numbers game. 鈥淧articularly in STEM fields, there are fewer students, and no graduate students, to do the work,” Oishi says. “So a student can be in the thick of a project from an early stage.You can quickly see what it’s like to do scientific research and find out if it鈥檚 interesting to you because it’s so vastly different than coursework.鈥�
There鈥檚 variety, too, in the work that undergrads do. 鈥淯ndergrads in my research group play a variety of roles in computational and theoretical physics,鈥� he says, 鈥渇rom software development to what you might think of as traditional theoretical physics 鈥� using a pencil and paper and trying to make sense of equations.鈥�
Students also do data analysis, 鈥渨hich can be done with a minimal physics background,鈥� Oishi adds.
Doing research builds 鈥減ractical skill, even if you’re doing something extremely theoretical and extremely abstract.鈥�
Students learn the valuable, lifelong skill of searching for an answer when 鈥測ou don鈥檛 know even if there鈥檚 an answer, let alone what that answer is. Learning to grapple with that, learning how to sit with that feeling, and move through it productively 鈥� that鈥檚 the single greatest benefit of doing research.鈥�
