Samuel Cupp Email & Phone Number

Moscow, Idaho, United States

I led the development of the General Relativistics Hydrodynamics Library (GRHayL), which provides a modular, infrastructure-agnostic library to facilitate the development of general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics (GRMHD) codes for numerical relativity.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana Area

Topic: computational astrophysics, gravitational self-forceAdvisors: Peter Diener and Steven BrandtFor my thesis, I contributed to the Einstein Toolkit (ETK) with two projects. First, I improved the core Cactus Framework of the ETK. Second, I developed code for evolving the extreme-mass-ratio inspiral (EMRI) binary system.Cactus provides parallel I/O, data distribution, checkpointing, etc, for a wide variety of architectures. This allows applications developed and tested on workstations to seamlessly run on clusters and supercomputers. The previous method of applying boundary conditions and synchronizing ghost zones demanded that Cactus users have significant understanding of the inner workings of Cactus to properly incorporate them into their code. In addition, the implementation frequently resulted in over-synchronization, which is a serious performance concern. I automated these aspects of the Cactus Framework to improve usability and improve performance. I also provided diagnostic tools to further improve the Cactus user experience.In my work on EMRIs, I extended the scalar self-force code by Peter Diener to simulate the full gravitational self-force. The self-consistent method we use is difficult to implement such that it is numerically stable, but self-consistent evolution is an extremely-high accuracy method for comparison with other less computationally intensive codes. I implemented this work in the Regge-Wheeler-Zerilli and Lorenz gauges. The RWZ gauge code is currently being compared with frequency domain calculations for geodesic orbits in preparation for inspiral simulations. The Lorenz gauge code is still in development, as this gauge is significantly more difficult to implement in a numerically stable way.* Research funded by NSF OAC grants #1550551 and #2004157.

Clarksville, Tennessee Area

Research in Computational ChemistryAdvisor: Dr. Justin Oelgoetz2014-15 Award YearWe extensively revised the previous project's code, implementing modern Fortran features and changing our basic methods. We use user-defined molecular fragments to build a random amorphous network and optimize this network with MOPAC. We extract information from multiple instances of these random networks and average the results. At the time of my departure from the project, the code is parallelized and functional. It is ready to be tested with a realistic fragment set for comparison with experimentally known compounds.2013-14 Award YearWe designed and implemented a Metropolis Monte Carlo method to to determine physical characteristics of amorphous structures. This stage project suffered from very slow convergence and very poor performance for large atom sets. Specifically, the construction of the amorphous network was very slow (random single atom placement) and did not adequately restrict the configuration space being considered. In addition, single-atom-movement for the Metropolis algorithm was very slow and often insufficient for convergence in any reasonable timespan.*Research funded by Austin Peay State University's Office of Undergraduate Research

Baton Rouge, Louisiana Area

Research in numerical relativityAdvisor: Dr. Peter Diener, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Louisiana State UniveristySummer 2013Secondary advisor: Dr. Frank Löffler, Center for Computation & Technology, Louisiana State UniversityDerived the characteristic matrices and coefficients to the wave equation in flat space-time with hyperboloidal slicing. Successfully evolved waves in flat space-time numerically by implementing derived equations into existing program.Summer 2012Derived and implemented angular momentum flux for scalar self-force problem (a simplified version of the Extreme-mass-ratio Inspiral problem).*Research funded by NSF via the Louisiana State University REU program

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics

Activities and Societies: Student Government Graduate Senator (Budget and Appropriations Committee, Student Fee Value Assessment Temporary.

Bachelor Of Science (Bs), Physics

Activities and Societies: Student Government Association (Senior Senator, Internal Affairs Committee), University Choir

Education record

Activities and Societies: National Honor Society, Scholar's Bowl Team Leader (4 years), Science Bowl Team Captain (2 years), "Fiddler.