Martin Purschke's Home Page
My name is Martin
L. Purschke. I am employed by the Brookhaven
National Laboratory and
work for the
sPHENIX experiment at
the Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider (RHIC). The sPHENIX experiment is a major upgrade to
the former PHENIX
experiment that took data from 2000-2016.
Here you can find a brief CV.
What am I doing here?
I'm a nuclear physicist and have been the data acquisition coordinator for PHENIX for many years. I have the same role in the sPHENIX experiment now.Just to give you an idea how far we have come with "big data science" - in the just completed 2024 run of the sPHENIX experiment, we took 54PB (yes, PetaBytes) of raw data to disk and tape.
On the side, I am the current chairman of the of the BNL Cyber Security Advisory Council (CSAC), whose charter is to "formulate, establish and review BNL's security policies, plans and strategy, and to advise the Chief Information Officer on security and other issues."
I worked with a group that builds a Positron Emission Tomograph (PET)
Scanner for rats, called RatCAP. The idea is
that we image the brain of a rat while it is awake and doing whatever
a rat is doing. To the best of my knowledge, this "awake animal"
aspect is really new. All PET scanners in operation work only for
anesthetized animals. Our rats carry the detector like a small ring
around their head and can otherwise move about freely. The problem
with unconscious rats is that their brains are asleep, and the
anesthesia suppresses the processes one is interested in.
The members of the Physics Department on the project are providing
support in building and running the detectors, data acquisition
(that's me), simulations (me again), and analysis. We are using the
data format and analysis framework of the PHENIX experiment, so the
project is using a professional and quite modern framework. For a
recent high-profile publication, have a look at our
paper in Nature.
A Roll-Your-own Linux Rescue CD 
Years ago I made a script and templates which
allow you to easily create your own rescue or setup CD, USB stick, or
PXE boot system. To this day, I use this technology to set up virtually all
machines in the sPHENIX DAQ system.
At heart I'm really a tinkerer, sometimes on the job, but most often privately. On some of the relevant channels you will find some posts about projects of mine about home automation systems (did you read above that I'm the chair of BNL Cyber Security Council? I usually apply what I know to harden and fortify those control systems that are often designed without a lot of security in mind.)
My address at BNL is
Brookhaven National Laboratory |
If you have downloaded my GPG key from a keyserver, you can verify its
authenticity with this fingerprint:
A5AE 1BA2 2702 838A 4E39 9AE6 45DA 112E 2302 D676 |