Ph.D. from Columbia and NASA GISS in Supercomputing
For my Ph.D. I continued to do research in climate modeling on
supercomputers at Columbia University and NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies (GISS) using NASA supercomputers,
also some of the fastest in the world, like those at
NCAR.
Again (see
M.S. Credentials
entry), this research required a lot of sophisticated
programming (i.e., computer science; see
B.S. Credentials
entry) with knowledge of the underlying hardware (i.e.,
electrical engineering; see
B.S. Credentials
entry). For advanced study in this I attended NASA's High
Performance Computing School at the Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt MD, as well as building my own
"supercomputer" (same networked parallel processors but fewer
and slower).
Some of this modeling supercomputer research is described
in
my
dissertation available on the NASA GISS
website.
Columbia and NASA GISS are in Manhattan, New York City, so
during 9/11 I was thus living and working there, where both
World Trade Center towers were brought down by foreign
terrorists in hijacked airliners. This brought the issue of
security close to home for me, particularly IT and security
since
9/11
Was Due to IT Incompetence. Moreover, after 9/11,
foreigners working at NASA, and there were/are many, had to
undergo lengthy background checks in order to use the
supercomputers, even those foreigners who had already been
using them for years (see
IT
Hiring: Foreigners in
Principles of
IT Incompetence).
(Interestingly, right before 9/11 I was learning to skydive at
a small airport out in New Jersey. When you're learning, you
can't have more than a month between jumps or you have to
start all over again and it's expensive. I had 12 non-tandem
jumps from 14,000 feet and only needed a couple more before I
could solo; before that you have to have an expensive
instructor jump with you. But after 9/11 they closed all the
small airports around NYC for several months. I gave up
skydiving.)
From Dec 2000 to Jan 2001, I was part (a CTD instrument
operator) of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Antarctic
research cruise aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer icebreaker out
of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia and studying the Mertz Glacier
region of Antarctica, where no ship had been before. During
the cruise I learned about doing
email via
non-geosynchronous satellite — so only a once-per-day
window to send emails — including its expense, which
meant text-only no-attachment emails.
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