(04-06-2016, 12:57 PM)jmbi Wrote:

(04-06-2016, 10:06 AM)mpr Wrote: I'm two months into an internship at an astrophysical research center. I work for a guy who is designing the active optics system for a large telescope. Active optics is the system that moves the mirrors of the telescope around in real time to account for disturbances in the atmosphere. It's been a lot to learn but super cool so far. I've worked on geometric simulations and ray tracing, which suits me because I prefer a good deal of math in my work. Been using python, C, and CUDA C++.

Wow, what an awesome gig. Are you guys doing some machine learning stuff? I'd assume that'd require some pretty serious computing power.

We don't do any machine learning; tracing light rays through optical systems is pretty much a solved problem. Training algorithms wouldn't get us better answers. We do however leverage a lot of computing power. We have CUDA C++ code that runs on the gpu. The optical systems we need to simulate are huge, and we need to do it in real time.

For anyone interested, the math involved is some differential calculus, some numerical methods, and some linear algebra. Would be happy to answer more specific questions.