Curriculum Vitae

Robert Brown

Contact information

Box 90305, 260 Physics, Durham, NC 27708-0305

Education

Ph.D.Duke University1982

Areas of Research

Theretical Condensed Matter Physics

Professional Service

Publications

Books
  1. R. Brown, Introductory Physics 1 and 2 (2023) .
  2. R.G. Brown and M. Ciftan, Monte Carlo study of the helicity modulus of the classical Heisenberg ferromagnet, in Condensed Matter Theories 13,14 (1998), Plenum, New York .
  3. R.G. Brown and M. Ciftan, Critical Exponents of the Classical Heisenberg Model, in Condensed Matter Theories 12, edited by John. W. Clark and P. V. Panat (1997), pp. p. 345, Nova Science Publishers, New York .
  4. R.G. Brown and M. Ciftan, The Dynamic Critical Exponents of the 3d, O (3) Classical Heisenberg Model, in Condensed Matter Theory 10, edited by Artur Polls (1996), Nova Science Publishers .
  5. R.G. Brown and M. Ciftan, Quantum Statistical Microdynamics and critical phenomena, in Condensed Matter Theories 6, edited by S. Fontoni and S. Rosati (1991), Plenum, New York .
  6. R. G. Brown and M. Ciftan, Multipolar integral equation theory and generalized multiple scattering theory, in Condensed Matter Theories 4, edited by J. H. Keller (1989), Plenum, New York .
  7. R. G. Brown and M. Ciftan, Local dynamics, correlation, and phase transitions: N-body versus nonlinear quantum optics, in Condensed Matter Theories 3, edited by J. S. Arponen, R. F. Bishop and M. Manninen (1988), Plenum, New York .
  8. R.G. Brown and M. Ciftan, Convergence properties of an exact band theory, in Condensed Matter Theories 1, edited by F. B. Malik (1986), Plenum, New York .
Papers Published
  1. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Critical behavior of the helicity modulus for the classical Heisenberg model, Physical Review B Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, vol. 74 no. 22 (Winter, 2006), American Physical Society (APS) .
  2. Brown, RG, Finite size scaling of the helicity modulus of the classical Heisenberg ferromagnet, Physical Review Letters (2005) .
  3. Brown, RG, Maximizing beowulf performance, Proceedings of 4th Annual Linux Showcase and Conference 2000 Als 2000 (January, 2000) .
  4. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Brown and ciftan reply, Physical Review Letters, vol. 78 no. 11 (January, 1997), pp. 2266, American Physical Society (APS) .
  5. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Dynamic critical exponents and sample independence times for the classical Heisenberg model., Physical review. B, Condensed matter, vol. 54 no. 22 (December, 1996), pp. 15860-15874 .
  6. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, High-precision evaluation of the static exponents of the classical Heisenberg ferromagnet., Physical review letters, vol. 76 no. 8 (February, 1996), pp. 1352-1355 .
  7. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Critical scaling of the dynamic critical exponents of the classical Heisenberg ferromagnet, Phys. Rev., vol. B54 (1996), pp. 15860 .
  8. Brown, RG, Softwares hard questions, Scientific American, vol. 272 no. 1 (January, 1995), pp. 8-8 .
  9. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Statistical microdynamics of extended systems in natural function spaces, International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, vol. 48 no. 27 S (January, 1993), pp. 363-375 .
  10. R.G. Brown, The 2d/3D classical Heisenberg ferromagnet (1992)(Presented at the March, 1992 Simulation Methods Workshop at the Center for Simulational Studies in Athens, GA; published in the workshop proceedings. (Springer-Verlag)..) .
  11. R.G. Brown, Multipolar Expansions for Multiple Scattering Theory (1991)(Presented at the 1991 Materials Research Society Fall Symposium (session V) in Boston, MA; published in the symposium proceedings.) .
  12. Ciftci, AK; Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Elementary integral of Bessel functions., Physical review. B, Condensed matter, vol. 41 no. 5 (February, 1990), pp. 3242-3243 .
  13. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, N-atom optical Bloch equations: A microscopic theory of quantum optics., Physical review. A, General physics, vol. 40 no. 6 (September, 1989), pp. 3080-3105 .
  14. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Comment on "Energy-band equation for a general periodic potential", Physical review. B, Condensed matter, vol. 39 no. 14 (May, 1989), pp. 10415-10419 .
  15. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Multipolar expansions for the empty-lattice problem., Physical review. B, Condensed matter, vol. 39 no. 6 (February, 1989), pp. 3543-3550 .
  16. Brown, RG, Generalised non-muffin-tin multiple scattering theory, Journal of Physics B Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics, vol. 21 no. 11 (December, 1988), pp. L309-L316, IOP Publishing .
  17. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Numerical tests of high-precision multiple-scattering band theory., Physical review. B, Condensed matter, vol. 33 no. 12 (June, 1986), pp. 7937-7940 .
  18. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Response to "non-muffin-tin band theories of the multiple-scattering type", Physical review. B, Condensed matter, vol. 32 no. 2 (July, 1985), pp. 1343-1346 .
  19. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Erratum: A generalized non‐muffin‐tin theory of band structure, International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, vol. 28 no. 19 S (January, 1985), pp. 751-752, WILEY .
  20. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, A generalized non‐muffin‐tin theory of band structure, International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, vol. 27 no. 6 (January, 1985), pp. 803-804, WILEY .
  21. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, A generalized non‐muffin‐tin theory of band structure, International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, vol. 26 no. 18 S (January, 1984), pp. 87-104, WILEY .
  22. Brown, RG; Ciftan, M, Generalized non-muffin-tin band theory, Physical Review B, vol. 27 no. 8 (January, 1983), pp. 4564-4579, American Physical Society (APS) .
  23. Ciftan, M; Brown, RG; Saibel, E, Stress activated Raman scattering and microcrack detection, International Journal of Engineering Science, vol. 21 no. 11 (January, 1983), pp. 1285-1293, Elsevier BV .
Other
  1. R.G. Brown, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (June, 2005)(A list of column titles and topics follows. The column itself was initially called "Cluster Kickstart", which explains the focus on topics for the beginner. In January, 2005 the column's name was changed to "Cluster Edge" and topics are more free ranging..) .
  2. R.G. Brown, A Modest Proposal, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (May, 2005)(What if we made a benchmark daemon a built-in component of standard Linux? Tools with a library interface could optimize in many useful ways, and automagic resource aware cluster schedulers would finally become possible.) .
  3. R.G. Brown, A New Year, a New Column, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (January, 2005)(Random thoughts about clusters, column names, and Linux versus Windows in my home cluster/LAN.) .
  4. R.G. Brown, Packets 'n' Protocols II, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (October, 2004)(Wrap your data in TCP, pop it into an IP datagram, and insert it into an ethernet envelope...continued and with UDP thrown in for good measure.) .
  5. R.G. Brown, Packets 'n' Protocols, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (September, 2004)(Wrap your data in TCP, pop it into an IP datagram, and insert it into an ethernet envelope.) .
  6. R.G. Brown, Head Node: A True Clustory, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (September, 2004)(Top 500 or Gordon Bell? Cost-benefit, not raw performance, is what cluster computing is all about..) .
  7. R.G. Brown, Cluster Infrastructure, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (June, 2004)(Location, location, location. Clusters need space, power, cooling, and network access.) .
  8. R.G. Brown, PVM, Part II, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (April, 2004)(In this column we continue our exploration of PVM, the parallel computing subroutine library that more or less enabled the current explosion of high-performance parallel computeclusters to happen.) .
  9. R.G. Brown, Serious Parallel Computing: PVM, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (March, 2004)(The idea of a homemade parallel supercomputer predates the actual Beowulf project by years if not decades. In this column (and the next), we explore "the" message passing library that began it all and learn some important lessons that extend our knowledge of parallelism and scaling.) .
  10. R.G. Brown, Amdahl's Law, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (February, 2004)(Clustering seems almost too good to be true. If you have work that needs to be done in a hurry, buy ten systems and get done in a tenth of the time. If only it worked with kids and the dishes. Alas, kids and dishes or cluster nodes and tasks, linear speedup on a divvied up task is too good to be true, according to Amdahl's Law, which strictly limits the speedup your cluster can hope to achieve.) .
  11. R.G. Brown, Doing Work in Parallel, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (January, 2004)(Last month we started out by learning how to use pretty much an arbitrary linux LAN as the simplest sort of parallel compute cluster. This month we continue our hands-on approach to learning about clusters and play with our archetypical parallel task on our starter cluster to learn when it runs efficiently and just as important, when it runs ifficiently.) .
  12. R.G. Brown, Benchmaster (2004)(Benchmaster is a microbenchmark program designed to time and test system performance at a low level. It will eventually be added to the wulfware suite as a component of xmlbenchd, a new project that provides a daemon interface to xml-wrapped drop-in benchmark programs so that applications can be built that can automatically tune their algorithms to the particular hardware they are running on and so that grid tools can be built that can dynamically determine the resources available on an anonymous grid node.) .
  13. R.G. Brown, Wulfware (2004)(Wulfware is a collection of several tools (xmlsysd, libwulf,wulfstat, wul ogger) designed to support the monitoring of clusters and grids. xmlsysd is a lightweight daemon that provides xml-wrapped system statistics and other information extracted from /proc and various systems calls. wulfstat and wul ogger are ncurses and straight ascii (respectively) tools for connecting to the xmlsysd daemons running on an entire cluster and either presenting it with a user-selectable refresh delay in a tty (xterm) window or printing it in a simple column format to standard out where it can easily be fed to a logfile for eventual plotting or to other tools(e.g. a builder of a web view of the data). This is of obvious and immediate use for monitoring cluster status, tracking particular jobs, determining resource utilization for gridware schedulers or policy engines.) .
  14. R.G. Brown, Dieharder (2004)(Dieharder is a fully GPL random number generator tester, under development by Robert G. Brown and Dan Summerhayes. When complete it will incorporate all of George Marsaglia's diehard battery of tests for random number generators, plus the NIST Statistical Test Suite (intended to test random number generators for cryptographic purposes), plus various additional tests from Donald Knuth's The Art of Programming Volume II, Seminumerical Algorithms and devised by the authors. It is currently functional with a subset of those tests.) .
  15. R.G. Brown, Flashcard (2004)(Flashcard is a program for presenting simple ashcards to students in a standard terminal (e.g. xterm) window. Special features include an xml encoding of ashcard problems and the ability to present auditory cues (e.g. spelling words out loud) from compressed soundfiles.) .
  16. R.G. Brown, Building Your First Cluster, Monthly column in Cluster World Magazine (December, 2003)(The beauty of cluster computing is that it requires little more than a generic workstation LAN to do it. We begin to explore cluster computing with just that: a "Network of Workstations" (NOW) that you may well already have!.) .
  17. R.G. Brown, Beowulf Infrastructure, Linux Magazine (June, 2003) .
  18. R.G. Brown, The Critical Scaling of the Helicity Modulus of the O(3) Classical Heisenberg Ferromagnet (April, 2003)(A research progress report presented to the Duke High Performance Computing Group.) .
  19. R.G. Brown, Eden, A Home Beowulf, "Login" The Magazine of Usenix and Sage, vol. 26 no. 5 (August, 2001) .
  20. R.G. Brown, Maximizing Beowulf Performance (October, 2000)(Invited paper presented at the Extreme Linux track of the Atlanta Linux Showcase and Conference.) .
  21. R.G. Brown, Introduction to the Beowulf Design (April, 2000)(A much more elementary tutorial presented to the 2000 Techno-Security Workshop held in North Myrtle Beach, SC.) .
  22. R.G. Brown, Introduction to the Beowulf Design (March, 2000)(Tutorial presented at at Glaxo-Wellcome in the Research Triangle Park.) .
  23. R.G. Brown, Engineering a Beowulf-Style Compute Cluster (2000)(online Gnu Open Publication License book provided to the beowulf community at: http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma/Resources/beowulfbook.php.) .
  24. R.G. Brown, The Beowulf Design (1999)(Tutorial presented at 1999 Linux Expo in Raleigh, NC.) .
  25. R.G. Brown, Critical scaling of the dynamic critical exponents of the classical Heisenberg ferromagnet (1996)(Talk presented by R. G. Brown at the 1996 APS meeting, St. Louis, Missouri.) .
  26. R.G. Brown, Ferromagnetism in two dimensions (1991)(presented at the 1991 Southeastern Sectional meeting of the American Physical Society in Durham, NC.) .
  27. R.G. Brown, Pseudospin-ordered optical bistability for two-level atoms (November, 1986)(Presented at the meeting of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society in Williamsburg, VA.) .
  28. R.G. Brown, A numerical application of a generalized non-muffin-tin band theory (March, 1984)(Poster presented at Sanibel Quantum Chemistry Symposium.) .
  29. R.G. Brown, The position space Green's function and its application to a non-muffin-tin band theory (June, 1982)(Ph.D. dissertation.) .
  30. R.G. Brown, Multiple scattering and non-muffin-tin band theory (November, 1980)(presented at the Southeastern Sectional meeting of the American Physical Society.) .
Last modified: 2025/11/15