This blog is a simple way to share a quick thoughts of projects I’ve been working on: simulations, LLMs, machine learning, linux, and other hobbies. Get the RSS feed here!
One Month with Linux in Academia, an Experiment
Throughout the four years of my PhD in computational materials science at Purdue University, I’ve spent absurd amounts of time with my computer. A back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest it’s been over 80,000 hours! Knowing that I’ll be spending this inordinate amount of time this way, and motivated by this XKCD comic, I’ve invested a lot of time reducing friction in my computer use. To name a few of these optimizations: adopting alternative keyboard layouts, learning competitive typing, using a package manager, and using tiling window managers have all saved massive amounts of time.
September 8, 2025
Creating A Citation Web of my Publications
As a graduate student looking towards a career in academia, the pressure to publish highly-cited papers is omnipresent. Performing good science helps; but studying citation patterns seems to be an essential component to a highly-cited career. To be able to estimate the impact of a paper before having written a word seems an essential skill to build. I’m hardly the first to have this idea; the entire fields of bibliometrics and scientometrics explore this notion.
June 19, 2025
Ovito on GPU Nodes
When rendering visualizations of large systems in our group, we often use Ovito, running on an Intel Mac in our office space. This seems a little strange, given that we have large amounts of high-performance computing resources at our disposal. Here’s a quick demo of how we can set up Ovito to run on a remote system. More generally, this is a demo of how to install any tricky-to-compile software, whether it be due to permission errors, missing dependencies, or out-of-date distributions.
January 27, 2025
Setting up atomate2
This page serves as a guiding resource for atomate2 in the Strachan Lab. As of now, it is intended to be a companion to the installation guide at materials project. If there exists demand for a more comprehensive guide, that can be done later. What is atomate2? According to their README, <p>Atomate2 is a free, open-source software for performing complex materials science workflows using simple Python functions. Features of atomate2 include</p> <ul> <li>It is built on open-source libraries: pymatgen, custodian, jobflow, and FireWorks.
February 5, 2024