[LA-SiGMA] LA-SiGMA courses

[Juana Moreno]

     The following three courses will be offered this spring and will be taught by LA-SiGMA faculty. Students and faculty can participate remotely using videoconferencing.

GPU Microarchitecture, David Koppelman, M W F 11:30-12:20 
Many Body Theory, Mark Jarrell,   M W F 9:30-10:20 
Condensed Matter Physics, Ilya Vekhter,  M W F 10:30-11:20 

    If you are a LSU student interested in these courses, please register early to ensure the course meets the required minimum student enrollment (class registration numbers are provided below). Students at other universities, please contact Juana Moreno at moreno at lsu.edu as soon as possible to arrange for the course to be offered at your university. Postdocs can attend without registering but we ask you to notify us. Classes begin January 14th and end May 2nd. Course descriptions are shown below.


******************  GPU Microarchitecture *********************************
This graduate course is taught by David Koppelman. This course will start with an overview of accelerators (e.g., NVIDIA GPU, Xeon Phi) and a survey of APIs (CUDA, OpenCL, OpenMP, OpenACC). It will continue with a discussion of parallelism (threads, latency, performance limiters), CPU execution features (dynamic scheduling, caches, branch prediction), execution architecture (many-thread (NVIDIA GPU) vs. many-core (Xeon Phi) organization, functional units, scheduling), storage hierarchy and synchronization (address spaces,  scratchpad stores and cache, basic data access and reduction strategies), instruction sets, basic algorithms (matrix multiplication, reduction, stencil calculations, sorting) and new research directions in heterogeneous computing. Classes meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday 11:30-12:20. For more information, please visit http://www.ece.lsu.edu/koppel/gp/ or contact David Koppelman at koppel at ece.lsu.edu. 

* At LSU, the course registration number is EE 7722. 

******************  Many Body Theory  *********************************
This graduate course focuses on advanced many-body techniques in material science, and is taught by Mark Jarrell. If students were interested, the first month of the course will be dedicated to discuss advanced statistical mechanics, including the physics of phase transitions (scale invariance near the critical point, scaling, renormalization group, etc). The rest of the course would be focused in many body theory either using a conventional approach (Gellman-Low, Wick's theory) or a path-integral based approach. Non-equilibrium Green function formalism, the  Keldysh formalism, or even the Wagner formalism could be also discussed. In addition, several many-body numerical methods are derived and used in class projects, including Dynamical Mean Field Approximation, Dynamical Cluster Approximation and renormalization group. A basic course in Condensed Matter/Solid State Physics (Ashcroft/Mermin) is a suggested pre-requisite for this course. Classes meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday 9:30-10:20. For additional information, please visit http://www.phys.lsu.edu/~jarrell/COURSES/ADV_SOLID_HTML/course_advss.html or contact Mark Jarrell at "jarrellphysics at gmail.com".

* At LSU the course registration number is PHYS 7893. 
     	     
******************  Condensed Matter Physics *********************************
A graduate course taught by Ilya Vekhter aimed at both experiment and theory students working in condensed matter physics. The course focuses on a phenomenological description of ordered phases,  especially on magnetism and superconductivity. We will learn how to write the appropriate Ginzburg-Landau theory for different situations based on symmetry principles. We will then describe ferro- and anti-ferromagnetic orders, structure of the magnetic domains and domain walls, superconductivity, influence of an applied magnetic field on magnetic and superconducting order, and interplay between the two. A connection between the simplest microscopic models and the Ginzburg-Landau expansion will be discussed. Current technology allows the class to be highly interactive and discussion-based across campuses. Classes meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday 10:30-11:20. For additional information, please contact Ilya Vekhter at "vekhter at lsu.edu".

* At LSU the course registration number is PHYS 7364. 

    For questions, please contact Juana Moreno at moreno at lsu.edu.
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Juana Moreno, Associate Professor
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy & Center for Computation and Technology
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803
Phone: 225-578-7586,  Fax: 225-578-5855, email: moreno at phys.lsu.edu
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