Dear All, Please see below details of next week's IIC Colloquium, and feel free to forward to anyone you think would be interested! I heard Lorena speak in Scotland last week and she gave an impressive talk. Many thanks, Mark ---------- Forwarded message ---------- You are cordially invited to next Wednesday's IIC Colloquium, one in a series of seminars where speakers will emphasize advances in heterogeneous computing with broad applications in computational science. **************** Toward GPU-Accelerated Meshfree Fluids Simulation Using the Fast Multipole Method November 4, 2009, 4:00 pm Room G115, Maxwell Dworkin, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge Lorena A. Barba Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boston University Abstract For the better part of the past 50 years, advances in algorithms and increasing computing power have made computational fluid dynamics, CFD, a mature discipline. What are some remaining frontiers of the discipline? One of the challenges in fluid simulation continues to be the need to straddle many scales. New computational methods still need to be developed that are able to adapt to the many scales of a problem. Another frontier recently opened is the development of hardware-aware software. Multi-core computers are on everyone’s desktop nowadays, and a growing trend in using graphics cards and other specialized hardware is buzzing. On both these frontiers, there is great potential for meshfree methods. Particle-type formulations for CFD offer an alternative which is low in numerical diffusion, devoid of numerical dispersion and stability constraints. Meshfree methods offer a natural adaptivity in situations where mesh generation is a large burden. And meshfree methods could be especially well suited to exploit the new hardware technologies entering the scene. I will present an overview of a particle-type formulation for fluid dynamics, the vortex method.  This method requires an N-body solver within it, for which we use the fast multipole method.  In our goal of obtaining hardware acceleration for this method, I’ll describe our progress with the fast multipole method, where we currently achieve 480 gigaflops for a hundred-fold speedup on a GPU card. Bio Lorena Barba obtained her Ph.D. in aeronautics from California Institute of Technology in 2004.  She then joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of Bristol, UK. There, she was the leader of an EC-funded international project titled "Scientific Computing Advanced Training" involving 10 institutions in Europe and Latin America. The project allowed more than 30 young aspiring scientists to spend an extended period immersed in a research group in Europe. In the fall of 2008, she started a new position as Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in Boston University. Her research as a computational scientist and a fluid dynamicist covers particle methods used for fluid simulation, the development of fast and efficient algorithms, the use of novel computer architectures, as well as fundamental and applied aspects of fluid dynamics. --------------- Refreshments will be served at 3:45 pm. Mark your calendar for upcoming IIC colloquium: Nov. 18, 4:00 pm: Joe Futrelle, National Center for Supercomputing Applications Also please note the following special event: "Rethinking Computing"--a discussion of how computer science is enhancing scientific exploration and discovery to help solve the most pressing global challenges.  Craig Mundie, Chief Research & Strategy Officer, Microsoft Tuesday, November 3, New College Theater, 10-12 Holyoke Street, 2:30 pm (doors open at 2:15) For more information about IIC colloquia and other events : http://iic.harvard.edu/events/upcoming -------------- Initiative in Innovative Computing Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences_______________________________________________ iic-all mailing list iic-all(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.deas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iic-all