Modelling and Numerical Simulation with High Performance Computing

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Gabriel Wittum

DATE: Tuesday, May 3rd 2011
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room A22, Red building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 09.30

ABSTRACT:
Numerical simulation with supercomputers has become one of the major topics in Computational Science. To promote modelling and simulation of complex problems new strategies are needed allowing for the solution of large, complex model systems. Crucial issues for such strategies are reliability, efficiency, robustness, scalability, usability, and versatility.
After discussing the needs of large-scale simulation we point out basic simulation strategies such as adaptivity, parallelism and multigrid solvers. These strategies is presented in the following.
In the second part of the talk we show the application of these strategies to the simulation of processes from biosciences and environmental sciences. In particular we will show  simulation of permeation through human skin, signal processing in neurons as well as computations of density-driven groundwater flow.

BIO:

• from 11/08 W3 Professor for Modelling and Simulation, Institute for Informatics of Goethe University Frankfurt; Managing Director of G-CSC (Goethe Center for Scientific Computing)
• 2005 First price of doIT-Award for the reconstruction software NeuRA
• 1991 - 2008 Ten academic offers of professorships
• 10/00 - 10/08 Director of the Institute for Informatics of the University of Heidelberg
• 10/98 - 10/08 Chair for "Scientific Computing and Simulation in Technology", University of Heidelberg, Head of the research group „Simulation in Technology"
• 10/94 - 09/98 Managing Director of the Institute for Computer Applications (ICA), University of Stuttgart
• 01/94 - 09/98 Chair for Applied Mathematics (C4) and head of the department "Numerics for Supercomputers" of the Institute for Computer Applications, University of Stuttgart
• 1991 University professor (C3) for Numerical Mathematics, University of Heidelberg
• 1991 Habilitation, University of Heidelberg
• 1989 Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz Award for Applied Mathematics
• 1987 Dr. rer. nat. in Applied Mathematics, University of Kiel

Dr. Wittum's research interests are in modelling and simulation of problems from empirical sciences. His work spans a wide interdisciplinary arc from mathematics and computer science to several application fields. Foci are the development of advanced numerical methods for modelling and simulation, allowing the application of complex realistic and advanced modeling techniques, the development of simulation frameworks and tools and the efficient use of supercomputers for that purpose. These methods and tools are applied to problems from environmental research, energy research, neuroscience, medicine, pharmaceutical technology, finance, computational fluid dynamics, structural mechanics and many more. In some of
these areas, results were derived by modelling and simulation, which were later confirmed by experiments.

In total, G. Wittum has published 150 scientific publications and acquired approx. 15 Mio. EUR grant money over the last 20 years.

HOST: Prof. Mauro Pezzè