Report - Research Stay in Boston by Tridib Banerjee

Text: Tridib Banerjee

Hi, my name is Tridib and this is a short report on my 2 months research stay at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, United States.

There is no way to begin this report without first thanking everyone involved in making it happen. I would like to express how grateful I am to everyone from TRR who helped me through the entire research stay. From planning to securing of funds. To the organizers and the Vorstand, thank you so much. I would also like to thank the responsible people from Constructor university for expediting the fund disbursement so that I could pursue the research at my desired dates. I would also like to thank my supervisor of the research stay Prof. Raffaele Ferrari, for being a terrific mentor (alongside postdoc Simone Silvestri) and sponsoring the discretionary funding to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I would further like to thank Massachusetts Institute of Technology for making my immigration to US very easy. I would like to thank also my supervisor at TRR – Prof Sergey Danilov for always being available for consultations and helpful discussions and finally, also my current collaborators who kindly shared my workload so that I could focus on the research stay. Thank you all.

I joined the Climate Modelling Alliance to work in collaboration with California Institute of Technology and NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My role was to join the ocean modelling team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and help them diagnose their new advection scheme using a diagnostic technique Me, Sergey Danilov, and Knut Klingbeil developed during my PhD. It was a great experience and I learned a lot during the process. Unlike the ocean model that I had worked with in Alfred Wegener Institute, the one I had to use during my research stay ran on GPUs instead of CPUs. This shift of compute architecture meant rethinking of even the fundamental mathematical operations. The work was initially planned to be concise but later, we realized it to be bigger and more important than expected. We ran several interesting experiments and, in the end, we began writing a new manuscript together. Currently, we are running more experiments and working towards finishing our manuscript. In summary, the stay in Boston impacted my career way more than I thought.

While I had my fair share of work to do in Boston, I also enjoyed my time there a lot. I fell in love with their research culture and found a family in my land-lady who was so generous and kind to me during my whole stay. I also went to Michigan to visit my actual family, watch my very first American Football, that too a classic Ohio versus Michigan which Michigan surprisingly won (it was a total pandemonium), and also have my very first American thanksgiving. I was extremely scared going to US but I had nothing but only fun during my entire stay. I would definitely do it again.