Models, Algorithms, and Software: Tradeoffs in the Design of High-Performance Computational Simulations in Science and Engineering

Phillip Colella
Seminar

CT

Argonne National Laboratory
Building 362 Auditorium
Host Rusty Lusk
Event Sponsor REMINDER: Director's Special Colloquium

Phillip Colella of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will discuss "Models, Algorithms, and Software: Tradeoffs in the Design of High-Performance Computational Simulations in Science and Engineering" at a Director's Special Colloquium Tuesday, Jan. 19th.

The colloquium will begin at 10:30 a.m. in the Building 362 Auditorium. All employees whose schedules permit are encouraged to attend.

Colella is a senior staff scientist and leads the Applied Numerical Algorithms Group in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Computational Research Division.

His talk will describe the tradeoffs between the models, the discretizations, and the software in the development of high-performance computational simulations in science and engineering involving partial differential equations, including some motivating applications, and the combination of analysis and computational experiments that are used to explore the design space.

Many important problems such as combustion, fusion, systems biology, and climate change, involve multiple physical processes operating on multiple space and time scales. In spite of the physical diversity of these problems, there is a great deal of coherence in the underlying mathematical representations. They are all described in terms of various versions of the elliptic, parabolic and hyperbolic partial differential equations of classical mathematical physics.

Colella's research interests have included numerical methods for partial differential equations. He has made contributions in high-resolution finite-difference methods, adaptive mesh refinement, volume-of-fluid methods for irregular boundaries, and programming language and library design for parallel scientific computing.

His honors and awards include the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Sidney Fernbach Award for high-performance computing in 1998, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics/Association for Computing Machinery prize (with John Bell) for computational science and engineering in 2003, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004.