— The Setup

/uses

Borrowing from the /uses convention — the hardware, software, and corner of the room where the work actually happens. This is the rig running the case studies — the one that pushed Einstein@Home from 1.2M to 6.2M RAC/day with a Linux Mint partition and some patience.

My workstation: a curved ultrawide monitor flanked by bookshelf speakers and a broadcast microphone, with a glass-panel PC tower lit in cyan to the right.

Workstation

CPU
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
GPU
ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 LC OC
Memory
Trident Z Neo RGB 64GB DDR5-6000
Motherboard
ASRock X670E Taichi Carrara
Case
Corsair 7000X
CPU Cooling
Corsair iCUE H170i 420mm AIO
Storage
2× WD SN850 NVMe(2TB), 1x Crucial T700(1TB), 1x Crucial T705(2TB)

Full parts list on PCPartPicker →

Peripherals

Monitor
Samsung Odyssey G9 (49" curved ultrawide)
Keyboard
Corsair K100 RGB
Mouse
Corsair Nightsabre Wireless

Software

OS
Windows 11 Pro & Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon (dual-boot)
Editor
Visual Studio Code
Version control
Git, GitHub
Package managers
npm, pnpm, pip

Why dual-boot?

Windows handles desktop life — games, Discord, the bulk of class work. Linux Mint runs the GPU-compute workload (Einstein@Home via BOINC, with CUDA MPS), because the Windows Display Driver Model adds enough scheduling overhead to the CUDA dispatch path that I lose roughly 80% of the achievable throughput. That whole story is the Einstein@Home case study.