Michele Bianco Webpage

About

I am a PhD student, part of the Reionization group lead by Prof. Ilian T. Iliev at the Astronomy Centre of the University of Sussex.

My main focus is the study of the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). With the help of Radio-Transfer and N-body simulation, we provide numerical support for the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) and Square Kilometre Array (SKA) EoR experiments.

These simulations play a crucial role in preparing and understanding the properties of the reionization expected signals.

Current & Past Projects

List of projects that I took part or that are still going on.

VarCosmEoR
Study the effect of alternative cosmology on the observable of the Epoch of Reionization

21cm Seg-UNet
Neural network to identify ionised region during early stage of the cosmic reionization

DECI-14: Model Recombination
Modelling stochasticity for inhomogeneous subgrid clumping on cosmic reionization

Updated: November, 26th 2020

Education

Doctorate in Astrophysics

2017 - present

University of Sussex, United Kingdom

I employ Radio-Transfer and N-body simulations such as RAMSES-RT, C2-Ray and CP3M, to study the observational signatures of the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). At the moment I am developping a method to implement the sub-grid inhomogeneity to the C2-Ray code (see my projects for more details).

Master Degree in Astrophysics

2015 - 2017

Ludwig-Maximillians-University LMU Munich, Germany

I have explored the effect of large scale structure correlation on Galaxy cluster counts. I studied the mass and redshift dependencies of the Halo Number Counts Variance (HNCV), for order of magnitude accivable with upcoming surveys e.g: eRosita, DES, Euclid. I employed of a large suite of simulated cluster catalogs, using the PINpointing Orbit-Crossing Collapsed HIerarchical Objects PINOCCHIO code, a semi-analytic Lagrangian code that generates halo catalog on a LCDM cosmology. (Link to my thesis: HERE)

Bachelor of Science in Physics & Mathematics

2011 - 2014

University of Fribourg UNIFR, Switzerland

My undergraduated formation consisted in a combined degree with major in Physics (150 ECTS) and minor in Mathematics (30 ECTS). Physics lectures where mainly focused on theoretical explaination in class, with following practical workshops, for a total of 12 month long experiments. Varing topics were discussed, from atomic physics to spectroscopy and an introduction to N-body problem, alongside with advance differential analysis, linear algebra and statistical methods.

Training

Jul. 2019 NGCM Summer Academy at the University of Southampton

workshop on VTK visualization, Machine Learning and GPU acceleration with CUDA

May. 2019 EuroHPC Submmit Week

a PRACEdays19 event, gave a talk about "Multiscale Reionization" in Poznan, Poland

Mar. 2019 PRACE Winter School 2019 - Introduction to Machine Learning for Scientists

LINK

a PRACE training organized by the Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC) in Leuven, Belgium

Dec. 2018 Parallel and GPU Programming in Python

LINK

a PRACE training held by SURFsara in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Nov. 2018 GPU Programming with CUDA

LINK

a PRACE training held by EPCC at Imperial College London, United Kingdom

Sep. 2018 RAMSES User Meeting 2018
organized by the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique in Lyon, France

Oct. 2017 MPI and OpenMP for beginners and Advanced Topics in Parallel Programming
held by the High Performance Computing Center HLRS in Stuttgart, Germany

Skills

As part of my PhD, I work with a series of high performaces computers (HPC) part of the Partnership For Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) Tier-0 and Tier-1 resources.

▶ KAY, Irish Centre of High-End Computing ICHEC

(Project DECI-15, at present)

▶ CINECA, Super Computing Application and Innovation SCAI

(Project DECI-15, at present)

▶ JURECA, Jülich Research on Exascale Cluster Architectures JSC

(EoRNN project, Oct. 2019)

▶ JUWELS, Jülich Wizard for European Leadership Science JSC

(EoRNN project, Oct. 2019)

▶ Piz Daint, Swiss National Supercomputer Centre CSCS

(Project DECI-14, Apr. 2017)

▶ MareNostrum IV (2017), Barcelona Supercomputing Centre BSC

(Project DECI-14, Apr. 2017)

▶ APOLLO Cluster, permanent account at the University of Sussex

Programming languages:

▶ Python (NumPy, SciKit, Pandas, TensorFlow, Keras)
▶ Fortran95
▶ C/C++
▶ HTML/CSS
▶ Batch Script

Astronomical and Scientific tools:

▶ DS9, TopCat, Aladin Sky Atlas
▶ R, Matlab, Wolfram Mathematica, Maple (2017)

Visualization tools:

▶ VTK, MayaVi

Interests

Some photos of me during conference or in my free time.

Useful Links

The Epoch of Reionization - Prof. Saleem Zaroubi
Online lecutre about the Epoch of Reionization and the Cosmic Dawn.

Cosmic Reionization Group in India - Prof. Somnath Bharadwaj
Four video lectures on "21cm Physics and Cosmology".

Introduction to HPSC - Victor Eijkhout
Online book on introduction to high-performance scientific computing.