Invited Speakers
The following renowned experts will join us at ParCFD 2024 to enrich our conference with keynote lectures on various topics of interest to our CFD community.
Lennart Schneiders - SIEMENS Digital Industries Software
Lennart Schneiders is a Software Engineer and researcher at Siemens Digital Industries Software. He received his PhD from RWTH Aachen University in 2017. Until 2022, he was a postdoctoral researcher at RWTH Aachen, Jülich Aachen Research Alliance, and California Institute of Technology. Lennart is currently a developer of the multiphysics CFD software Simcenter STAR-CCM+. His research interests lie in numerical method development, turbulent multiphase flow, and high-performance computing.
Title of Lennart's keynote lecture: The intricacies of adaptive unstructured mesh refinement for industrial flows
Abstract:
The simulation of industrial flows is associated with significant uncertainties arising from the quality of the computational mesh. In many industries, meshing therefore is considered an expert job. With the advances in parallel computing and GPU hardware reducing solver times, meshing can become a bottleneck in certain industrial workflows. While adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is an intriguing approach to alleviate some of those problems, developing such a technique in a robust form is a challenge in its own.
In this talk, the intricacies of developing a general purpose AMR scheme are discussed. This includes the definition of generic solution-based refinement strategies. And it will be demonstrated that refining an unstructured mesh does not automatically guarantee lower truncation errors, but can even lead to the opposite.
Christian Hasse - Technical University Darmstadt, Simulation of reactive Thermo-Fluid Systems
Christian Hasse is full professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Darmstadt University of Technology. He holds the chair of Simulation of reactive Thermo-Fluid Systems. He has supervised successfully more than 30 PhD students and currently 25 PhD students and post-docs are working in his group. He has more than 270 peer-reviewed publications and has served in multiple editorial boards and as associate/guest editor. He is organizer of scientific workshops and conferences focusing on sustainable combustion to achieve net zero emissions.
Prof. Hasse is elected Fellow of the Combustion Institute for his contributions on turbulent combustion, solid fuel combustion, multi-phase flow and soot formation. He has been elected to the Board of Directors of the International Combustion Institute in 2024. His main research interests are modeling and high-fidelity simulation of reactive and non-reactive flows, especially for CO2-free and CO2-neutral fuels such as hydrogen, ammonia, biomass, E-fuels and metals. In addition to fundamental studies on flame structures and dynamics, he also actively works on transferring these results to real-world applications including (aero-)engines, boilers and processes chemical engineering. For these topics, his group has developed a number of high-fidelity software applications that are deployed national Tier-2 and European Tier-0/1 supercomputers. In 2024 he has received an ERC Advanced Grant on aluminum steam combustion in which he aims to unravel the fundamental properties of pressurized Al-steam flames for the entire scientific chain, from single particles to turbulent flames with millions of particles, through a well-orchestrated combination of high-fidelity simulations, advanced modeling, and tailored experiments.
Title of Christian's keynote lecture:
How high-fidelity simulations of hydrogen combustion on supercomputers accelerate the energy transition
Abstract:
Reactive Computational Fluid Dynamics (rCFD) has become an indispensable tool in fundamental and applied research. In addition, rCFD is used in industrial design, such as aero engine combustors or gas turbines. This success is based on the combination of decades of scientific model development, efficient numerics and ever-increasing computing power. This situation is about to change as both the energy system (1) and the HPC architecture (2) are undergoing disruptive changes.
First, the urgent need to shift from fossil fuels to renewable fuels such as hydrogen requires the redesign of energy conversion systems due to the completely different combustion characteristics of renewable fuels. Combustion models for high-fidelity simulations are lacking and must be developed based on in-depth physical understanding. Second, the next generation of supercomputers will be mostly based on GPUs rather than CPUs. Efficient use of these systems will require a new class of CFD software with specialized numerics.
In this talk I will first introduce the role of rCFD in combustion system design before I highlight the role of hydrogen in the energy transition and how it differs from conventional fuels. After discussing the impact of GPU-based supercomputers on rCFD software development, I will present how GPU-based direct numerical simulations can unravel the complexities of hydrogen combustion.
In summary, in a rapidly changing environment, simulations on upcoming Exascale systems will provide physical insights that were deemed impossible just a few years ago. This will increase the impact of rCFD on the entire spectrum from fundamental science to industrial design of innovative systems.
Niclas Jansson - KTH Royal Institute of Technology,
PDC Center for High Performance Computing
Niclas Jansson is a researcher at PDC Center for High Performance Computing at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He received his M.S. in computer science in 2008 and a PhD in numerical analysis in 2013 from KTH. Between 2013 and 2016, Niclas was a postdoctoral researcher at RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science, where he was part of the application development team of the Japanese exascale program, Flagship 2020, focusing on developing extreme-scale multiphysics solvers for the K computer, and held a visiting scientist position at RIKEN between 2018 and 2021. He has extensive experience in extreme-scale computing as a developer of RIKEN's multiphysics framework CUBE, the HPC branch of FEniCS and the next-generation spectral element flow solver Neko, and is currently the coordinator of the EuroHPC Center of Excellence for Exascale CFD.
Title of Niclas' keynote lecture:
Towards Exascale Simulations of Turbulent Flow
Abstract:
Recent trends and advancements in including more diverse and heterogeneous hardware in High-Performance Computing (HPC) are challenging scientific software developers in their pursuit of efficient numerical methods with sustained performance across a diverse set of platforms. As a result, researchers are today forced to refactor their codes to leverage these powerful new heterogeneous systems. We present our work on addressing the extreme-scale computing challenges in computational fluid dynamics, ensuring exascale readiness of turbulence simulations. Focusing on Neko, a high-fidelity spectral element code, we outline the optimisation and algorithmic work necessary to ensure scalability and performance portability across a wide range of platforms. Finally, we present performance measurements on a wide range of accelerated computing platforms, including the EuroHPC pre-exascale system LUMI and Leonardo, where Neko achieves excellent parallel efficiency for an extreme-scale direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulent thermal convection using up to 80% of the entire LUMI supercomputer.
Ricardo Vinuesa Motilva - KTH Royal Institute of Technology,
School of Engineering Sciences, Teknisk Mekanik, Fluid Mechanics
Dr. Ricardo Vinuesa is an Associate Professor at the Department of Engineering Mechanics, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is also Vice Director of the KTH Digitalization Platform and Lead Faculty at the KTH Climate Action Centre. He studied Mechanical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain), and he received his PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. His research combines numerical simulations and data-driven methods to understand, control and predict complex wall-bounded turbulent flows, such as the boundary layers developing around wings and urban environments. Dr. Vinuesa has received, among others, an ERC Consolidator Grant, the TSFP Kasagi Award, the Goran Gustafsson Award for Young Researchers, the IIT Outstanding Young Alumnus Award, the SARES Young Researcher Award and he leads several large Horizon Europe projects. He is also a member of the Young Academy of Science of Spain.
Title of Ricardo's keynote lecture (online):
Explaining and controlling turbulent flows through deep learning
Abstract:
In this presentation we first use a framework for deep-learning explainability to identify the most important Reynolds-stress (Q) events in a turbulent channel (simulated via DNS) and a turbulent boundary layer (obtained experimentally). This objective way to assess importance reveals that the most important Q events are not the ones with the highest Reynolds shear stress. This framework is also used to identify completely new coherent structures, and we find that the most important coherent regions in the flow only have an overlap of 70% with the classical Q events. In the second part of the presentation we use deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to discover completely new strategies of active flow control. We show that DRL applied to a blowing-and-suction scheme significantly outperforms the classical opposition control in a turbulent channel: while the former yields 30% drag reduction, the latter only 20%. We conclude that DRL has tremendous potential for drag reduction in a wide range of complex turbulent-flow configurations.
Linda Gesenhues - EuroHPC Joint Undertaking
Dr. Linda Gesenhues is a Programme Manager at the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). Linda has a longstanding interest in HPC and in particular has worked on research on High Performance Computing applications for computational mechanics and fluid dynamics.
Linda graduated from RWTH Aachen University with a Bachelor and Master in Mechanical Engineering. She then went on to complete her bi-national doctoral studies at the High Performance Computing Center at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and the Chair for Computational Analysis of Technical Systems at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, researching on finite element simulations of geophysical flows. She continued her career as a research group leader at the Chair for Computational Analysis of Technical Systems focusing on massively parallel simulations of phase boundaries during melting processes. In 2022, Linda joined the Research&Innovation sector of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking as a Programme Mananger for HPC applications, training and skills.
Title of Linda's keynote lecture:
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking: Leading the Way in European Supercomputing
Abstract:
In this presentation the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) will be introduced. The EuroHPC JU joins together the resources of the European Union, 31 European countries and 3 private partners to develop a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe. Linda will present the operational EuroHPC supercomputers located across Europe and give details on how to access this infrastructure.
Linda will then present some of the JU’s missions, such as the acquisition of new supercomputers including exascale systems and quantum computers, the implementation of an ambitious research and innovation programme and how to further strengthen Europe’s leading position in HPC applications.
