2014+Second+Announcement



=School of Modern Astrophysics (SOMA-2014)= ="X-ray Astronomy and Particle Astrophysics"=

Second announcement
This is the Second Announcement for the international "School of Modern Astrophysics - 2014" to be held in Zelenogorsk, Russia from July 15 until July 26, 2014. We sincerely hope that this School will be a successful scientific event, which will advance the physics of compact objects. During the School, we plan to organize a number of social and cultural activities for participants and their accompanying persons.

**Software/hardware requirements for SOMA-2014**
__**IMPORTANT**: you will need to bring a laptop running Linux or Mac OS__ with the following software installed to get the most out of the school. Our school will involve practical sessions during which you will have the chance to learn to use and practice using numerical fluid dynamics methods for attacking astrophysical problems. For this, each of you will need to have **1)** a laptop running Linux, UNIX, or MAC OS X (note: MS Windows is not enough! but you may try to install another operating system in a virtual machine such as VirtualBox) with **2)** the following software installed. It is important that you install the software **prior** to your arrival in school so that you can immediately start using the software.

1. Visualization and analysis software: i. GNU Octave: http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html ii. installed package LHEASOFT https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/lheasoft/ including subpackages XSPEC and XRONOS In order to be able to work with the latest calibration files of different telescope one need to have CALDB database. ftp://legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov/caldb In the lab we plan to work with ASCA and RXTE observatories, therefore only these subdirectories are required.
 * Software requirements:**

2. MPI To leverage the possibilities of parallel computing (if you have multiple cores on your laptop or on computational clusters), you might want to make sure that MPI is installed on your machine. This will allow you to speed up the computations by a factor roughly equal to the number of cores on your machine. This comes in handy to get to the results (read: pretty pictures) fast.

**Seminars**
On the second week of the School we are going to arrange a few scientific seminars for participants. Please, let LOC know during the first week whether you are going to give a 15-30 minute talk to create the schedule.

We look forward to seeing you at the school soon!