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Nick Twum.

Computer Science Student

I build High Performance Simulations, and projects that make a difference.

About

I'm a Computer Science student at Whitman College (expected 2028). As an HPC Researcher, I'm building an open-source C++ library for delayed differential equations that pairs OpenMPI and OpenMP parallelism to run SEIR epidemiological simulations about 100x faster than serial code. I also intern in web development at Whitman College Communications, focusing on accessibility and performance.

When I'm not in the terminal, I'm snowboarding, playing chess or tennis, or hiking. I'm also Vice President of Whitman's ACM chapter, where we organize semesterly hackathons, run engineering workshops for 30+ members, and are developing the Whitman Innovation Lab.

Currently building

LangLeafWIP

An LMS for teachers and students to keep track of consistent grammar errors.

DDEIntWIP

A highly optimized open-source Delay Differential Equation solver.

Work

Work

Featured projects

View full project archive

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Barnes-Hut N-Body Simulation

A C++ gravitational simulation that evolves from a brute-force O(N²) baseline into a Barnes-Hut algorithm with OpenMP parallelization and Morton ordering - real-time with up to ~150,000 bodies.

C++OpenGLOpenMP

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Experience

Experience

Where I've worked

  1. Jan 2026 - Present

    HPC Student Researcher · Whitman College

    Research focused on making delayed differential equation simulations fast and correct at scale. Built an open-source C++ simulation library that pairs OpenMPI and OpenMP parallelism to deliver a 100x speedup over serial execution in an SEIR epidemiological simulator running across 10,000+ neighborhoods, and redesigned synchronization boundaries in shared-memory regions to eliminate race conditions and out-of-range failures.

    • C++
    • OpenMPI
    • OpenMP
    • Dormand-Prince
    • Distributed Systems
  2. Jun 2025 - Present

    Web Development Intern · Whitman College Communications

    Support the college's public web presence. Refactored 1,000+ pages and raised site accessibility from 70% to 99.6%, resolved 90%+ of broken URIs flagged by Monsido, built feature pages for the college site, and triaged hundreds of web-related technical support tickets from internal departments.

    • Accessibility
    • WCAG
    • HTML/CSS
    • Monsido
    • CMS
Toolbox

Toolbox

Skills & technologies

PythonC++CJavaJavaScriptTypeScriptHaskellHTMLCSSPyTorchLangChainFastAPIONNXNumPyPandasReactOpenGLMPIOpenMPPostgreSQLDockerLinuxGit
Journal

Journal

Latest writing

All posts
  • Optimized Real Time N-Body Simulation - Part 2: SIMD and OpenMP

    Dec 20, 2025

    Optimized Real Time N-Body Simulation - Part 2: SIMD and OpenMP

    The brute-force N-body simulation from Part 1 gets a ~400x speedup through profiling, compiler optimizations, OpenMP multithreading, and hand-tuned AVX2 intrinsics.

    • simulations
    • optimizations
    • cpp
    • simd
    • openmp
  • College AI - Part 1 - Scraping Scandals

    Sep 24, 2025

    College AI - Part 1 - Scraping Scandals

    Inordinate amount of boredom fell upon me, after getting tired of the usual routine of going through multiple pages just to check my cafeteria menu, I...

    • python
    • scraper
  • Optimized Real Time N-Body Simulation - Part 1 Brute Force Method

    Aug 10, 2025

    Optimized Real Time N-Body Simulation - Part 1 Brute Force Method

    We've all seen those cool simulations colliding or a black hole sucking everything up. I find them pretty cool to look at. Wondering how every particle gets...

    • simulations
    • optimizations
    • cpp
    • in_progress