People

BU Team and Collaborators

In alphabetical order.

Lorena Barba is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University since Fall 2008.  She obtained her PhD in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology in 2004, and then joined Bristol University in the United Kingdom as a Lecturer in Applied Mathematics.  Her research interests include computational fluid dynamics, especially immersed boundary methods and particle methods for fluid simulation; fundamental and applied aspects of fluid dynamics, especially flows dominated by vorticity dynamics; the fast multipole method and applications; and scientific computing on GPU architecture. Prof Barba is an Amelia Earhart Fellow of the Zonta Foundation (1999), a recipient of the EPSRC First Grant program (UK, 2007), an NVIDIA Academic Partner award recipient (2011), a recipient of the NSF Faculty Early Career award (2012) and a leader in computational science and engineering internationally. She can be contacted at labarba@bu.edu.

Cris Cecka received his PhD in Computational Mathematics from Stanford University in 2011. He now now works as a Lecturer/Researcher at Harvard University in the new Institute for Applied Computational Science. His research focuses on finite element methods, boundary element methods, and high performance computing. He can be contacted at ccecka@seas.harvard.edu.

Hans Johnston received his PhD in Mathematics from Temple University in 1999. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan from 2000-2004, and since then has been in his present position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statisitics at UMass Amherst.  His research focuses on computational fluid dynamics and high-performance computing. He can be contacted at johnston@math.umass.edu.

Simon Layton obtained his MSc in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University in 2011, and a joint BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Bristol in 2008. He is currently a PhD candidate under the supervision of Professor Barba at Boston University. During his postgraduate studies, he has worked on GPU-based projects, including the fast Gauss transform and a CUDA-based implementation of the immersed boundary method in fluid dynamics. Currently he is working on GPU-accelerated classical algebraic multigrid, work begun as an intern at NVIDIA in Jonathan Cohen’s Emerging Applications group during the Summer of 2011. He can be contacted at slayton@bu.edu.

Rio Yokota obtained his PhD from Keio University, Japan, in 2009 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof Barba, first at the Mathematics Department of University of Bristol (UK) and then at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Boston University.   During his PhD, he worked on the implementation of fast N-body algorithms on special purpose machines such as MDGRAPE-3, and then on GPUs after CUDA was released.  He co-authored a paper awarded the Gordon Bell prize in 2009 in the price/performance category, using GPUs. Dr. Yokota developed the first parallel FMM released under the ExaFMM name in November 2011. He is now a research scientist at the King Abdullah University of Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. He can be contacted at rio.yokota@kaust.edu.sa