Just a reminder of tomorrow's IIC Colloquium with Bruce Boghosian. See
you there!
*********************
A Dynamical Systems Approach to Turbulence: Challenges for High-
Performance Computing
April 7, 2010, 4:00 pm
Room G-125, Maxwell Dworkin, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge (*note room
change*)
Bruce Boghosian, Professor and Chair of Mathematics, Tufts University
Abstract
Turbulence is sometimes called the "last unsolved problem of classical
mechanics." While it has long been understood that the details of
turbulent flow are essentially unpredictable beyond a number of
Lyapunov times, owing to the so-called "butterfly effect," there
remains hope of a comprehensive statistical description of turbulence.
Two developments in dynamical systems theory over the past 20 years
provide solid foundation for that hope. The first is the observation,
placed on firm foundation in the 1980s, that Navier-Stokes flow has a
finite-dimensional attracting set of states. The second is the
development of the dynamical zeta function formalism by Ruelle, and
its deployment by Cvitanovic, Pollicott, Eckhardt, Yorke and others,
enabling statistical descriptions of chaotic dynamical systems, given
knowledge of their unstable periodic orbits (UPOs). For this reason,
the efficient numerical computation of UPOs has gained great
importance over the past decade, in both the dynamical systems and
turbulence literature. Periodic orbits for high-dimensional state
spaces are devilishly difficult to calculate, requiring high-
performance computing and placing new demands on algorithms, accuracy
and hardware. This talk will discuss some of these computational
challenges and demonstrate the successful computation of UPOs of
driven Navier-Stokes turbulence in two and three spatial dimensions.
About the speaker
Professor Boghosian is Professor and Chair of the Department of
Mathematics at Tufts University. He additionally holds an adjunct
professorship in Computer Science there. His research interests center
on theoretical and computational fluid dynamics, with emphasis on
variational principles for fluids, the problem of turbulence, the
visualization of fluid flow, and scientific applications of high
performance computing and grid computing. He has held visiting
positions at the École Normale Supérieure, Peking University,
University College London, the University of California, Berkeley and
Davis, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste,
Italy), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow
of the American Physical Society and a Foreign Member of the National
Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. He has authored or
coauthored more than 60 articles and given more than 130 invited talks.
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Refreshments will be served at 3:45 pm.
Mark your calendar for these upcoming IIC Colloquia:
Wednesday, Apr. 14: Frank Baetke, High Performance Computing, Hewlett
Packard
Wednesday, Apr. 21: Pavlos Protopapas, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics and IIC/SEAS
For more information about IIC colloquia and other events :
http://iic.harvard.edu/events/upcoming_____________________________________…
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