SEMINAR: A computational productivity toolbox: applications to nanomagnetism and computational science

Virtually all branches of science have profited from the vast increase in computational power in recent decades. Yet, given that scientists are rarely trained as programmers, there is often a substantial barrier to harnessing this power and it is easy to lose track of results or get lost in data analysis. In my own work I study nanomagnetic systems where the interaction of multiple forces on different length scales leads to frustrated behaviour and complex dynamics. Despite this complexity, intense worldwide effort is directed towards the application of nanomagnetism in fields ranging from data storage to nanoscale sensing. From a computational point of view, nanomagnetic systems present huge challenges, both in terms of efficiently solving the underlying differential equations (especially in a finite-element framework), and in terms of subsequent data analysis, e.g. exploring large parameter spaces.

Guided by showcase examples from my own research on nanomagnetic and spintronic systems, I will give a hands-on, informal presentation of a few tools for efficient scientific computation, data analysis, and result documentation which I feel can be useful to a wide community of people. These will include: the IPython notebook (an interactive computational/documentation environment with optional parallelisation), FEniCS (a high-level finite-element framework for efficient, automated solution of differential equations) and Sumatra (an "automated electronic lab notebook for computational projects, with the aim of supporting reproducible research").

My hope is to inspire a wider inter-disciplinary discussion where people share thoughts about available tools and workflows that do (or don't) work for them.

Max is a theoretical mathematician-turned-computational physicist, doing his PhD at the Institute of Complex System Simulation (ICSS) at the University of Southampton, UK, and has a special interest in exploring how to make scientific research more reproducible and openly accessible. Max's stay at the School of Physics thanks to a UWA Research Collaboration Award. He is being hosted by the Spintronics and Magnetisation Dynamics Group and is working on applications of spintronic devices to biological sensing.