Physics 410: Computational Physics: Course News


This document will be updated throughout the course; entries are in reverse chronological order.

Friday, December 7, 11:30 AM

HW5 keys are now available on the chair at the top of the stairs outside my office. I will e-mail the comments/grades for the HW (for those of you have finished at least some of it) a little later, when the grading has been completed.

A reminder that the term projects are due on Monday; if I'm not in my office, please leave them in my mailbox in the phys/astro main office. PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO SLIDE THEM UNDER MY OFFICE DOOR, OR LEAVE THEM OUTSIDE MY OFFICE. This means that you'll have to get things in before the end of office hours on Monday (i.e. 4:30 to be safe, 5:30 if you want to take a chance that I'll actually be in the office between 4:30 and 5:30, which I can't guarantee).

It is my practice to retain all term projects which are submitted to me; if you are interested in feedback about your project, you can come see me after the final.

Feel free to contact me via e-mail or office visit at any time before the test should you have questions/concerns regarding the course.

Thursday, November 22, 5:30 PM

Denis has pointed out an error in equation (5) of the Homework 5 handout: h should be defined via
   h = tmax / (2**olevel)
not
   h = tmax / (2**olevel + 1)
Special apologies to those of you who have already completed the question, but the modification should be easy to make, and, when implemented, will have the added advantage that the convergence behaviour of the independent residual evaluation will be improved.

The on-line version of the homework handout (PS) has been updated to reflect the change.

Tuesday, November 20, 2:15 PM

Prof. Bernie Shizgal, director of the Institute for Applied Mathematics has announced the possibility of several studentships for next summer. If you are interested see the following link (PDF) for more details.

Tuesday, November 20, 1:30 PM

For those of you doing solitons or non-linear wave equations for your term project, I have made some supplemental material available via the project page.

Wednesday, November 14, 10:30 PM

The final exam (test) will be held at 8:30 AM, December 14, 2001, in CHEM 124.

Monday, November 12, 5:30 PM

The Homework 5 handout is now available. I will distribute hard copy in tomorrow's class.

Wednesday, November 7, 10:30 AM

Two comments about the current homework:
  1. In completing question 3, you may find it more straightforward and less confusing not to use "coefficient arrays" as I did in the bvp1d4.f example.
  2. I notice that a few of you are producing gnuplot plots using the directive
        set size 0.760,1.0
    
    as per the Linear Systems handout. This command dates from an old version of gnuplot which was used in previous years, and on different machines. With the version currently installed on the lnx machines, the command to produce a unit-aspect-ratio (i.e. square) plot is
        set size square
    
    Please use this command instead. The on-line materials have been updated accordingly.

Tuesday, October 30, 8:30 AM

The deadline for Homework 4 has been extended to Thursday, November 8, 10 AM

Tuesday, October 9, 9:30 AM

The deadline for Homework 3 has been extended to Thursday, October 18, 10 AM

Monday, October 8, 4:30 PM

I have updated the drivers for the graphics cards on the lnx machines, and, with luck, this will clear up some of the problems you have been experiencing with the consoles "freezing up".

Please e-mail me IMMEDIATELY if you encounter further difficulties of this sort

Tuesday, October 2, 2:30 PM

A preliminary handout for Homework 3 is now available. I will distribute hard copy in Thursday's class.

Thursday, September 27, 10:30 PM

Since there seems to be some confusion on this issue, note that for Problem (3.3) of the Maple homework
   <your-definition-here>
is "meta notation"; you are to replace the whole thing (including the "meta-chars" < and > with a procedure body). E.g.
   mysum := proc(a,b) <your-definition-here> end;
would become
   mysum := proc(a,b) a + b end;
When you have implemented `type/binarynumeric`, the type procedure should work as indicated in the assignment. The procedure definition for `type/binarynumeric` is separate from that of lreduce but, of course, should be defined in the same maple source file.

Wednesday, September 26, 1:45 PM

Robert Ferdman has brought to my attention that Maple 6 and Maple V return different values for Problem (2.1).

To avoid further confusion, Problem (2.1) is simply to be deleted from the Homework Assignment.

Tuesday, September 25, 3:45 PM

There is apparently a bug in Maple 6's implementation of plot which you may encounter in answering Problem (2.5) of Homework 2. Specifically, the auto-computed y-range for the plot of the error of the Taylor series expansion for x=0 .. 0.01 is apt to be a few orders of magnitude too large, rendering the plot per se rather meaningless.

The fix is to supply an additonal argument to plot specifying the y-range, as in

   > plot(sin(x), x=0..2*Pi, y=-1.2..1.2);

You will have to figure out an appropriate y-range for the case under consideration.

Thanks to Kristen and Tyron for bringing this to my attention.

Tuesday, September 18, 8:30 PM

A preliminary handout for Homework 2 is now available. I will distribute hard copy in Thursday's class.

Monday, September 17, 11:00 AM

Some of you may have noticed that when you ssh from physics to physics you are prompted for a password, even if your ~/.ssh/identity.pub from physics is in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on your physics account.

The reason for this is that physics is running Version 2 of ssh, which uses a different authentication mechanism than Version 1, which we discussed in class, and which you are using to complete Homework 1.

However, you can force ssh on physics to use the Version 1 protocol via the -1 option, as in

physics% ssh -1 physics
Thanks to Michael Bayer for bringing this to my attention.

Tuesday, September 11, 2:00 PM

As mentioned in class today, the deadline for Homework 1 has been extended to Thursday, September 20.

Friday, September 7, 5:00 PM

I have created the following accounts on the lnx machines:
  mbayer  ccameron
Refer to Tuesday's message for additional information.

Thursday, September 6, 6:00 PM

I have created the following accounts on the lnx machines:
  csamendt  emmerton  psandhu  jo
Refer to Tuesday's message for additional information.

Wednesday, September 5, 6:30 PM

The handout for Homework 1 is now available. I will distribute hard-copy in tomorrow's class.

Tuesday, September 4, 9:00 PM

I have created the following accounts on the lnx machines:
   borthwic jcheng  coppin   scsiszar aadutton rferdman mhinse  heajang
   jkalirai jknight mkurylow pletourn rmar     jmckay   asajina jjsidhu
   psih     dtsang  ttsui    kvirk    gwong    zibin
If you wish, and if your account appears in the above list, you should now be able to ssh into the lnx machines from a remote host via any one of
   ssh userid@lnx1.physics.ubc.ca
   ssh userid@lnx2.physics.ubc.ca
   ssh userid@lnx3.physics.ubc.ca
where userid is to be replaced with your own user id.

You can also log in directly to one of the three consoles in the Computer Lab per se, but if you wish to do so, you should read the notes HERE first.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Your password should be the same as it is on physics.ubc.ca.

Contact me immediately if you have problems logging in.

Friday, August 3

Our first scheduled class is
  Tuesday, September 4, 10:00-11:30 AM, Hennings 304
If you have any questions about the course, feel free to contact me (Matt Choptuik) via e-mail, phone (822-2412), or in person (Hennings 403).