CCSE's Ann Almgren gave an invited talk on December 9 at the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery & Engineering. Almgren's talk was titled Next-Generation AMR, and discussed a number of issues that need to be addressed as the AMR Co-Design Center takes Block-Structured AMR to the exascale.

CCSE's Emmanuel Motheau was an invited presenter at the Bay Area Scientific Computing Day 2016 (BASCD 2016), held December 3, 2016 at Stanford University. He presented the innovative hybrid compressible/low-Mach-number method that he is currently developing.

Preliminary results were presented during the conference, demonstrating the ability of the hybrid method to capture the aeroacoustic sound generation from an unstable low-Mach mixing layer, but with a significant gain on the computational cost compared to a purely compressible approach.

A national research team including members of CCSE has been awarded 45 million hours of on one of the world's fastest supercomputers, the Titan Cray XK7 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to further their research on explosive astrophysical phenomenon and model these complex occurrences by way of supercomputer-generated simulations. The award, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science through its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) Program, recognizes national research projects with high potential for accelerating discovery.

The project, titled Approaching Exascale Models of Astrophysical Explosions, is led by Michael Zingale and Alan Calder of Stony Brook University.

The research team will carry out a comprehensive study of stellar explosions and their precursors using a suite of simulation codes. The collaboration will study a host of astrophysics problems, and of particular interest to the Stony Brook team are problems powered by fusion reactions. Read more HERE.

Berkeley Lab will lead one of four co-design centers under the Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project (ECP). The Block-Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement Co-Design Center will be led by CCSE's John Bell, with support from Argonne National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The center will be funded at $3 million a year for four years.

The Co-Design Center will develop a new framework, AMReX, to support the development of block-structured AMR algorithms for solving systems of partial differential equations (PDE's) with complex boundary conditions on exascale architectures. Block-structured AMR provides a natural framework in which to focus computing power on the most critical parts of the problem in the most computationally efficient way possible.

Block-structured AMR is already widely used to solve many problems relevant to DOE. Specifically, at least five of the 22 exascale application projects announced last month in the areas of accelerators, astrophysics, combustion, cosmology, and multiphase flow will rely on block-structured AMR as part of the ECP.

See the full story here.

CCSE's Andreas Kreienbuehl and Michael Minion recently presented talks at the Fifth Parallel-in-Time Integration Workshop, held November 27 to December 2 in Banff, Canada.

Kreienbuehl's presentation described an application of the parallel full approximation scheme in space and time (PFASST) to simulations of the shallow water equations on a sphere. For these simulations, which were run at the NERSC supercomputing center, the high-order methods modeling environment (HOMME) used spectral elements to discretize the equations.

Preliminary results showed that, for a model problem, PFASST can outperform one of HOMME's standard implicit time steppers in terms of time-to-solution.

CCSE's Jean-Philippe Peraud gave a talk at the 69th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society - Division of Fluid Dynamics, held in Portland, Oregon, November 20-22, 2016. In his talk he presented a numerical method for simulating microscale electrokinetic flows and ion transport problems with the inclusion of fluctuating hydrodynamics.

Andreas Kreienbuehl gave a talk at the San Jose State University in the Physics and Astronomy seminar series on October 27, 2016. The presentation described an application of the parallel full approximation scheme in space and time (PFASST) to simulations of the shallow water equations on a sphere. The high-order methods modeling environment (HOMME) was highlighted as a tool to discretize the equations using spectral elements.

CCSE's Jean-Philippe Peraud recently gave a talk at the Eurotherm Seminar 108 -- Nanoscale and Microscale Heat Transfer V, held in Santorini, Greece, September 26-30, 2016. Peraud's presentation summarized his previous work on efficient methods for solving the Boltzmann transport equation for phonon transport, with an emphasis on Monte Carlo simulations and asymptotic approaches.

The DOE Exascale Computing Project recently announced 22 application development proposals that will receive funding for the next 3-4 years. CCSE will play an active role in five of the 22 projects, which will focus on developing next-generation simulation codes to model accelerators, explosive astrophysical phenomena, combustion, cosmology, and carbon capture. In these projects, members of CCSE will partner with other LBL scientists in CRD as well as the Nuclear Physics and ATAP (Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics) Divisions, as well as scientists from Argonne, Sandia, ORNL, NETL and NREL.

The full list of applications can be found here.

CCSE's Andreas Kreienbuehl presented a poster at AXICCS16 workshop on September 12, 2016. The poster described an application of the parallel full approximation scheme in space and time (PFASST) to simulations of the shallow water equations on a sphere. For these simulations the high-order methods modeling environment (HOMME) used spectral elements to discretize the equations.

CCSE's Marc Day is the Berkeley Lab PI on one of five recently announced projects in the new DOE High Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) Program in which Berkeley Lab is a partner. See more about all five partnerships here.

HPC4Mfg, established in March 2015, is designed to create an ecosystem that allows experts at DOE national labs to work directly with U.S. manufacturers to teach them how to adopt or advance their use of HPC to address challenging problems in manufacturing.

Day's project is titled "Improving Gas Reactor Design With Complex Non-Standard Reaction Mechanisms in a Reactive Flow Model." Alzeta Corporation designs and manufactures industrial equipment to destroy hazardous waste gases created by the fabrication processes used to make computer chips, photovoltaic devices, LEDs and flat panel displays. Many of these gases are harmful because they have high global warming potential. Through this project, Day will help Alzeta will use 2D and 3D modeling of gases and flow mechanisms to develop more energy-efficient methods of controlling these hazardous gases and improve equipment design.

Jean-Philippe Peraud gave two presentations at the 30th International Symposium on Rarefied Gas Dynamics, held July 11-15 2016 in Victoria, British Columbia. In his talks he presented the asymptotic theory and an adjoint-based Monte Carlo method for solving the Boltzmann transport equation in the context of phonon-mediated heat transfer.

Michael Minion gave a talk at the International Conference on Spectral and High Order Methods (ICOSAHOM2016) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 27 - July 1st, 2016. Minion's presentation described his work on Multilevel Spectral Deferred Corrections (MLSDC) methods and how they are used to increase the accuracy, efficiency, and/or parallel scalability for numerical approximations of partial differential equations.

Andreas Kreienbuehl Juliane Mueller and Michael Minion all recently presented talks at SIAM AN16, held July 11-15 in Boston. Kreienbuehl's presentation described an application of the parallel full approximation scheme in space and time (PFASST) to simulations of climate on a sphere. For these simulations, the high-order methods modeling environment (HOMME) used spectral elements to solve the shallow water equations. Minion's presentation gave an overview of Multilevel Spectral Deferred Correction (MLSDC) methods. Minion was also the organizer of the SIAM minisymposium.

Mueller presented her algorithm research developments for black-box expensive optimization problems with hidden constrains, i.e. when simulations that are used to compute the objective function values fail. This is often the case in application areas in which not all feasible parameter combinations make physically sense or when solvers fail to converge.

CCSE's Changho Kim was an invited presenter at the Summer School on Multiscale Modeling of Materials, held June 20-23 2016, at Stanford, CA. The Summer School was organized by the Collaboratory on Mathematics for Mesoscopic Modeling of Materials. Kim's talk was titled, ``Memory Function Approach and Brownian Motion Theory.''

A video of his talk is available on Youtube here.

Juliane Mueller gave a talk on her derivative-free multi-objective optimization research at the conference of the Canadian Operations Research Society in Banff, Alberta. This meeting brings together researchers and practitioners from Canada and the United States who work on optimization problems and their applications.

Brian Friesen, a NESAP postdoc who works closely with CCSE, has been awarded the University of Oklahoma Provost's Disseration Award in Science and Engineering. His thesis advisor, Prof. Eddie Baron, writes, "This is the first Physics & Astronomy dissertation that has been awarded the University prize in at least twenty years."

For this thesis, Friesen studied the spectroscopic properties of type Ia supernovae at late times (months to years after explosion) using the radiative transfer code, PHOENIX, to perform calculations of supernova explosion models. After modifying the code to capture the relevant physics for these models, he ran the code on OU's Boomer supercomputer, and also on supercomputers at NERSC, where he is now a NESAP postdoc.

CCSE's Andreas Kreienbuehl gave a talk at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the Earth System Modeling seminar series on June 16, 2016. The presentation gave an introduction to the parallel full approximation scheme in space and time (PFASST). Furthermore, it discussed a possible application thereof to simulations of the shallow water equations on a sphere using the spectral element discretization from the high-order methods modeling environment (HOMME).

CCSE's Vince Beckner and NERSC's Brian Friesen were co-authors on the paper titled "Accelerating Science with the NERSC Burst Buffer Early User Program" that recently won the Cray User Group Best Paper Award. In the paper, five use cases were highlighted, including Nyx/BoxLib. You can access the paper here.

Lead author Wahid Bhimji presented the paper on May 11 at the CUG meeting in London.

At this annual event, women from Berkeley and Stanford networked and shared their research in order to become aware of each other's work. Women from academia and industry were also invited to share their knowledge and experiences in panel sessions. Mueller gave a 10-minute overview of the optimization research done at LBNL.

A paper titled "TiDA: High-Level Programming Abstractions for Data Locality Management", by Didem Unat, Muhammed Nufail Farooqi, and Burak Bastem of Koc University and Tan Nguyen, George Michelogiannakis, John Shalf, Weiqun Zhang and Ann Almgren is one of 25 research papers accepted for presentation at the ISC High Performance Conference to be held in Frankfurt, Germany in June 2016.

Jean-Philippe Peraud presented a brief talk about his work on fluctuating hydrodynamics and transport in charged fluid mixtures at the CRD All Hands Meeting on Thursday, March 3. Jean-Philippe received his PhD in 2015 from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Computation at MIT, where he focused mainly on stochastic numerical methods in transport and diffusion processes in nanoscale heat transfer. He currently works in CCSE with Alejandro Garcia of San Jose State University. and CRD's John Bell.

Juliane Mueller recently presented her research on multi-objective optimization at the IMA Research Collaboration Workshop in Minneapolis. The workshop served as a forum for researchers from national labs and industry to discuss advances and challenges in optimization and uncertainty quantification in energy and industrial applications.

Leen Alawieh and Emmanuel Motheau have just joined CCSE as postdoctoral researchers. Leen did her PhD at Johns Hopkins University, and until December was a postdoc at UT Austin. Emmanuel did his PhD at the Institut National Polytechnique Toulouse in France, and joins us from a postdoc position at the Adelaide University in Australia.

Welcome Leen and Emmanuel!