I am a Spanish student that came in Japan to do a master’s degree, and eventually decided to continue also as a PhD student. I started my PhD in October 2021.

I am working in the KOTO experiment, which consists of a particle detector located at JPARC that gets data from a particle beam. To get more data, the beam intensity is being increased, but then the hit rate in the detector also increases, and our Data Acquisition System has to be upgraded accordingly. Currently, I am working on that upgrade. I am using GPUs to accelerate the online data processing to a level that is much higher than the requirements imposed by just the beam upgrade. This will allow us to do more complex physics analyses, by making a more efficient use of the data we collect.

I find interesting working with GPUs. They are very well suited for our needs, and although writing and running code for them is not an easy task, it feels very rewarding to see them in action performing around 100 times faster than a “normal” computing server. I also feel that these devices could be applied to many other fields of science, and I am looking forward for the opportunity to test them into another application.