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 work 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 CERN Courier ran an article about our
then-new high-speed and large-volume data transfers to Japan
using GRID tools. We are doing this routinely now, but back in 2005 this was a still new technology. This
topic got later picked up by Science Grid.
I gave an invited (non-PHENIX) talk at the
"Computing in High-Energy Physics" (CHEP) conference
in Interlaken, Switzerland. That conference celebrated the 50th birthday of CERN.
Here
are the slides of the talk. The organizers also shot a
video
of my performance on stage.
The next CHEP conference took place in Mumbai (Bombay). Here are
the PowerPoint sides of the talk I gave there.
I got a certification from the SANS
Institute as a "UNIX Security Administrator". It involved
completing a practical assignment, where you develop and describe a
solution for a real-world problem. I chose "Securing
a Redhat 7.2 Machine on a Home Network". Although Linux versions
are much higher these days, many of the points remain valid. If you
run a wireless network at home, have broadband internet access, or
have multiple computers on your network, you might get some hints how
to improve your defenses against the bad guys.
Martin Purschke's Home Page
My name is Martin
L. Purschke. I am employed by the Brookhaven
National Laboratory and
work for the
PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). For a quick overview of the experiment,
see here.
Here you can find a brief CV.
What am I doing here?
I joined PHENIX in 1996 and am the Data Acquisition Coordinator
of the experiment. PHENIX has currently about a million readout channels. When RHIC
is running, we take data at a rate of about 5000-9000 Events/s, where one Event
means the data from one particular collision. This translates into a data stream
of several 100 MByte/s to disk. For the largest collision system, Au+Au, we have been running
at 800MByte/s (we jokingly refer to this as "one data CD per second".)
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.
Presentations of Interest
A Roll-Your-own Linux Rescue CD
I made a script and
templates which allow you to easily create your own rescue or
setup CD. I use this to set up virtually all machines in the
PHENIX DAQ system.
A C++ Course
Some time ago I gave two classes about "Programming in C++". One class
took place at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the
other here at Brookhaven Lab. If you follow the link, you can view the
presentation, download the course, run the examples. Be warned,
though, that the course is rather old, and C++ has progressed. Most of
the examples should still work. One of these days I'll update the
course and add new material to it.
My address at BNL is
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Physics Department Bldg 510C
Upton, NY 11973-5000
Tel (631) 344-5244
Fax (631) 344-3253
Email: purschke@bnl.gov or mlp@bnl.gov
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