Founded 1876 daily since 1892 online since 1998
Wednesday October 16, 2019 vol. CXLIII no. 90
Twitter: @princetonian Facebook: The Daily Princetonian YouTube: The Daily Princetonian Instagram: @dailyprincetonian
{ www.dailyprincetonian.com }
U. announces new supercomputer to aid plasma physics and fusion research ON CAMPUS
By James Anderson Contributor
COURTESY OF DENISE APPLEWHITE / OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS
Traverse was financed by the University, and it will be used both by graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty at the versity, said that his group of researchers now uses a new, more efficient mathematical construction, called a deep neural network, which uses machine learning to compute the classical mechanics forces in any number of arrangements that share the same statistical probability. Researchers derive the interaction potentials from density functional theory, which considers the quantum mechanics of the atoms in their ground states. “Having access to that kind of machine at Princeton will allow us to do this work on our code and experiment with the capabilities offered by this architecture,” Car said.
IN TOWN
Volunteer firefighter program celebrates 10 year anniversary By Sruti Chitluri Contributor
About a mile away from the University, nestled next to Dependable Cleaners and Tiger Garage, lies the fire station. The building has a brick exterior, interrupted by three large garage doors and the words “Princeton Fire Department” sprawled across its outside. The fire department and the University are uniquely connected through the volunteer firefighter program, which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Director of the Department of Emergency and Safety Services for Princeton Bob Gregory was the University’s first fire marshal and was involved in the creation of the program, also known as the Princeton Fire Department Associate Member Program. According to Deputy University Spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss, last year, volunteers responded to 185 fire calls. When asked to describe the typical qualities of a vol-
In Opinion
unteer firefighter, Gregory paused before saying, “It’s in people’s genes. They get the fire bug.” Some newer volunteers go to probationary training before becoming full-fledged volunteers, while others join the force with more experience. However, all volunteers share some common characteristics. “They are service-oriented. They like serving the community and helping people,” Gregory said. While volunteers can be full-time students, most are University employees who have a scheduled duty day. The interlocking of the University with the fire department is an important factor in the flourishing of the program. Gregory added that the fire department is grateful for the support of the University. “The University and town like to work together for the betterment of the community. There’s great appreciation on both sides,” he said. Such sentiments of unity See FIREFIGHTERS page 2
Editorial assistant Madeleine Marr further explores gender disparity in the University’s faculty and contributing columnist Juan José López Haddad discusses the importance of iconography around campus. PAGE 4
Traverse has a similar architectural structure to Summit, the most powerful supercomputer in the world, housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Traverse is a 1.4-petaflop system, making it capable of 1.4 million billion floating-point calculations per second. It is on the TOP500 list, a ranking of the 500 most powerful supercomputers based on standard tests. Panagiotopoulos and Car noted that Traverse will soon be overtaken by more powerful supercomputers. Car predicted that exascale systems, which would be capable of a billion billion calculations per second and function 1,000 times faster than petascale ones, will
be built in the next few years. He noted that PPPL will likely be able to use technology developed at Oak Ridge. What sets Traverse apart from the previous HPCRC clusters is its architecture — described by Car as “a hybrid architecture that consists of CPU [central processing unit] and GPUs [graphics processing units].” The clusters were built by IBM, and the GPUs were supplied by Nvidia, which sells GPUs for many personal computers and gaming systems. Car said the first exascale supercomputers will share a similar architecture to Traverse, meaning that the work required to adapt the researchers’ current algorithms to
Traverse will remain useful. Traverse will help PPPL model the movement of plasma in its tokamak NSTX-U, the largest of its kind in the world, to better understand how to control the plasma on a millisecond timescale. PPPL was founded in 1951 and has been working, among other projects, to create a viable fusion reactor potentially capable of generating virtually unlimited energy. Traverse was financed by the University, and it will be used by graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty at the University, as well as PPPL, which is managed by the Department of Energy.
BEYOND THE BUBBLE
Sallie Kim ’86 threatens Betsy DeVos with jail in student loan debt case By Marissa Michaels Staff Writer
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is in trouble with University alum Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim ’86 of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. On Monday, DeVos visited Judge Kim’s court over a lawsuit against the Department of Education’s continued collection of student loan debt from students who were defrauded by Corinthian Colleges. Judge Kim lifted the previous stay on the lawsuit, meaning that hearings in the next few weeks will determine if DeVos will face sanctions. “I’m not sure if this is contempt or sanctions. I’m not sending anyone to jail yet, but it’s good to know I have that ability,“ Kim said, according to The Washington Post. “I’m most concerned with helping the people who were harmed by this — this problem that the government created.” In a spring 2018 ruling, Judge Kim issued an injunction forbidding the Department of Education to continue collecting student loan debts from 16,000 former students of Corinthian Colleges.
COURTESY OF U.S. DEPT. OF EDUCATION
Betsy Devos is the U.S. Secretary of Education.
The for-profit college system closed in April 2015 after being caught practicing fraud and predatory lending. The lawsuit argues that the Department of Education’s actions in continuing to collect payment violate a form of federal loan forgiveness known as “borrow
Today on Campus 12:00 p.m.: Join Dannelle Gutarra Cordero for her lecture on “Scientific Racism in the French Debate about General Liberty during the Haitian Revolution.” Burr Hall 216
defense to repayment.” The rule means that “Borrowers may be eligible for forgiveness of the federal student loans used to attend a school if that school misled them or engaged in other misconduct in violation of certain laws,” according to the Department of Education’s website. See DEVOS page 1
WEATHER
The University’s High-Performance Computing Research Center (HPCRC) has acquired a new supercomputer, named Traverse, which will aid research at the University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), as well as other University programs. The addition joins six other computing clusters: Tiger, Dell, and Perseus, which are the largest and reserved primarily for faculty, as well as Nobel, Adroit, and Tigressdata, which are available to students. All the clusters are housed in a building on the Forrestal campus, about three miles from the main campus. Supercomputers require high amounts of energy, and HPCRC typically uses 1.8 megawatts of electricity and is equipped with backup generators. The clusters can also overheat, which requires ventilating them with cooled air. The facility is efficient enough to have earned a LEED Gold rating. Thanos Panagiotopoulos, the chair of the chemical and biological engineering department, said that Traverse will allow Princeton’s Chemistry in Solution and at Interfaces (CSI) lab to model the interactions of a few hundred molecules at a time. “We do problems involving very large-scale calculations that connect quantum mechanics with … the collective properties of water and aqueous solutions,” Panagiotopoulos said. The simulations usually last only on the order of a few picoseconds but can help CSI understand the atomistic dynamics of various materials. Roberto Car, director of CSI and the Ralph W. *31 Dornte Professor in Chemistry at the Uni-
HIGH
69˚
LOW
46˚
Heavy Rain chance of rain:
100 percent