2025-08-26: Summer in the Midwest
Wrapping up my internship with a presentation at Fermilab I was fortunate to spend the summer interning at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Marc Paterno. The whole experience was full of firsts. I had never been to Chicago or even Illinois before, and I had never seen a bison or a particle accelerator in real life. These are the kinds of things you only hear about on the news back in Europe. At first, the dorm I was placed in felt a bit cramped. But over time, I got to know many interesting people from all sorts of backgrounds, and somehow my room didn't feel small anymore. How PSO finds the global minimum For my project, we developed an efficient GPU-based multidimensional global optimization algorithm, which has been accepted to HiPC 2025 . It is a novel hybrid method that has two main phases: particle swarm optimization for global search and then a local refinement phase with BFGS, and automatic differentiation. It outperforms exis...