[BANANA] ASC ITS Lecture 7/31/06

[Linda Becker]

ASC Institute for Terascale Simulation
Lecture Series 2006

"Multi-level Flow Simulations in Complicated Geometries"

Prof. Marsha Berger
Courant Institute, New York University

Monday, July 31, 2006
Building 543 Auditorium
2:00pm
(Property protection area. Foreign national temporary escorted building 
access procedures apply)


ABSTRACT:
It can take months to get a practical flow computation "out the door" 
although the computation itself takes only hours.  Much more time is spent 
specifying or importing the geometry, generating the computational mesh, 
and checking and refining the result.  This has led to the pursuit of 
robust grid generators and flow solvers that make it easier to work with 
complex geometries specified by engineering CAD systems. We survey the 
Cartesian grid embedded boundary approach, which uses rectangular Cartesian 
meshes except for the irregular cells that intersect the boundary of a 
solid object. This approach is in routine use for aerodynamic calculations 
in several organizations, including the NASA Ames Research Center.

We touch on some of the technical issues in our work. Techniques from 
computational geometry allow robust computation of the intersection of the 
geometry with the computational mesh.  Special discretizations avoid loss 
of accuracy and stability at irregular boundary cells. Space-filling curves 
lead to efficient domain segmentation and high performance on the NASA 
Columbia supercomputer, which ranks fourth on the June 2006 "Top 500" list.


ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Marsha Berger received her PhD from Stanford University in 1982. Since then 
she has been at the Courant Institute of NYU, in various positions from 
postdoctoral researcher to professor, and mostly recently including six 
years as Deputy Director of the Institute. She was elected to the National 
Academy of Sciences in 2000, and the National Academy of Engineering in 
2005, for her pioneering work developing adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), 
starting with her thesis work with Joe Oliger at Stanford.  She has a 
longstanding collaboration with researchers at NASA Ames Research Center, 
where she has spent three full years and every summer since 1991. She is 
active in the SIAM community, and currently serves on its Board of Trustees.


Technical Host: David Keyes (925) 422-1325
Administrative Contact: Tiffany Ashworth (925) 424-3491

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