That is just his monitor on his work setup. The computer is the notebook you see open. He has another personal computer station next to his bed.
Most of his work is run on other computers he links to via the internet. He burns millions - many millions - of Dollars of CPU time on the biggest national laboratories supercomputers every fiscal year.
IIRC, his supercomputer use budget this year (ending 30 September 2021) was $10M. And he has to plan carefully not to spend too much of it too fast or go over the budget. Butt it's Uncle Sugar money, so no biggie really, just a nastygram email or a need to write up a supplemental for the grant. It is all DOE and DARPA money. His 'group' is a major component of a HUGE (even by my standards) DOE project that will span the 2020s and prolly 2030s and 2040s and so on. Think of Nixon's War on Cancer. It is still going on and larger now that ever. He had to get a security clearance to even get on the project.
His work is highly relevant to several key national security areas: semiconductors and semicon fabrication, battery tech, and purty much anything that uses materials - of any kind - particularly those that have not been invented yet because we are all waiting on DaSun's group to produce those tools to discover them other than by routine guess-and-hope, trial-and-error by monkeys at the lab bench. These are tools to predict materials and their properties by computer before they have ever been made. Basically it will tell folks where to look among all conceivable possibilities and also what chemicals to make and insight on how best to make them.
It is a project that is really similar to the Manhattan Project, and Race to the Moon, and the War on Cancer. Uncle Sugar is just throwing money at them.
The future of USA technology leadership depends on this. If China gets these tools first, they will make the discoveries first and they will be the next Silicon Valley and Route 128, and we will become a second-rate technology player like England became after WW2.
Best thing is he can work from anywhere he can connect to the internet. The beach. A ski resort. His room. Wherever. And he can make his own hours.
Plus, and this was unprecedented (to my knowledge) for a grad student, he is allowed by his U and national lab to do a 10 hr per week consulting gig with one of the biggest companies in the world and he still gets his tuition paid and a nice stipend from the gummint research grant. His 10hr/wk side gig is ... well ... he makes more from that than the combined value of h1is grant stipend and tuition, and by a bunch. His billing rate for the consulting is ridiculous. Not as ridiculous as my rate, but for a guy of his age, pretty crazy high.
I was kinda surprised the U and national lab signed off on it. I drafted the agreement for him and told him how to pitch it. But I think they all agreed because the goofy guy on the trampoline really has that much pull because of what he does and knows how to do.
As I have, he is benefiting from a scarcity market where he is a high value-added rare product.
Time may be money, but knowledge and skill in a rare area with high value add, that is BongoBukks.
And as I have written previously, the Dood is wicked smahht. Not just a dad's view, he is a member of the Federal government board that plans and manages national supercomputer resources. He didn't apply for that, they asked him to join the board. Nobody else on that board is below a professor or industry head (Cray, IBM, AMD, Intel, nVidia, etc.). For a grad student to get to these levels I have never heard of before. And I hear a lot.
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