Unfortunately, I did not obtain an academic position (I was aiming for an R1) but landed an industry postdoc job with IBM instead. I'm not complaining. It's challenging research and definitely cutting edge and bears a completely different mentality than life in academia.
...Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
You are now a doer :) Have you done any GPU work with cryptoprojects? I think one of the most interesting projects would be to offload all crypto operations of a bitcoin-qt wallet on a GPU. In this way scaling can benefit significantly because a gpgpu enabled wallet or node will be able to process large blocks with ease. One of the reasons why there's not much bumping up the megabytes of BTC blocks is that it may take too much time to process the transactions. With something like 1000 cores doing 1 verification each, that would be no issue. And, from what I've seen, the maths are mainly multiplications for EC cryptography.
No, I haven't done any GPU work on crypto-projects.
And yes the maths are mainly EC multiplications ... but isn't the verification already offloaded to ASICs?
Also, I think that this parallel process for verifying EC signatures is what is done already for Bitshares. Maybe it's the same for Graphene as a whole and applies to Steem? I'll need to check into this ...
ASICs only do the hashing in bitcoin. Verification is still cpu-bound...
Now I know ...