E7 Students Create a Human Contour Plot

Featured Faculty: Fotini Katopodes Chow

In 1922, Lewis Fry Richardson wrote about how he envisioned forecasting the weather using a numerical process.

At the time, a "computer" was a human who crunched numbers. Richardson dreamed of a "forecast factory" where thousands of human computers would be seated in a theater; each person would be responsible for the calculations for particular part of the globe, and would need to communicate with other parts of the globe to accurately predict the weather, governed by the underlying mathematical equations.

On Wednesday, April 20, 2016, students in Professor Tina Chow's E7: Introduction to programming for scientists and engineers class got a chance to participate in such a forecast factory.

The students solved a differential equation (2D time dependent diffusion - finite differences with Euler time stepping) by hand and displayed their value at each time step in a contour plot by holding up the correct color paper (like a card stunt at a football game).

To compute their own new value at the new time step, the students first needed to get values from the 4 students sitting next to them (left, right, front, and back) and compute a weighted average. This process mirrors modern parallel computing, including challenges with processor communication (getting values from their neighbors) and processor synchronization (waiting for their neighbors to finish a time step before moving to the next step).

Several GSIs and other graduate students contributed to make this a memorable E7 experience!

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