SCIENCE AT THE EDGE SEMINAR

Friday, 11 February 2011 at 11:30am

Room 1400 Biomedical and Physical Sciences Bldg.

Refreshments at 11:15


Speaker: Phillip Colella
         Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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

Abstract:

Many important problems in science and engineering such as combustion,
plasma physics, 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 and computational
representations. They are all described in terms of various versions
of the elliptic, parabolic and hyperbolic partial differential equations
(PDE) of classical mathematical physics, with the enormous variety and
subtlety coming from the way the PDE are coupled, generalized, and
combined with models for other physical processes. The complexity of
these models and the need to represent multiple scales lead to a
diverse collection of requirements on the numerical methods, with many
open questions about stability of coupled algorithms. Finally, the
complexity of models and algorithms, combined with the desire to obtain
reuse across a broad range of applications, complicates the the design
of high performance software implementations. In this talk, I will
attempt to describe the tradeoffs between the models, the discretizations,
and the software in the development of high-performance computational
simulations in science and engineering involving PDE, including some
motivating applications, and the combination of analysis and computational
experiments that are used to explore the design space.