PASI inspires TADMAC seminar series at UNAM
TADMAC stands for “Tecnologías de Alto Desempeño Aplicadas a la Modelación Matemática y Computacional”, meaning: High-performance technologies applied to mathematical and computational modeling. This is a new seminar series created to cover in greater depth the topics presented at the PASI in Valparaíso, and to apply them to the research topics of interest to the participants at Mexico’s national university, UNAM.
Dr Luis Miguel de la Cruz, faculty member at UNAM’s Institute of Geophysics, is one of the organizers of this new seminar series, which runs weekly from March to June 2011. He explained to Prof Lorena Barba, PASI lead organizer, that before PASI the various participants from Mexico were working in isolation on topics involving parallel computing. Attending PASI created the opportunity for them to learn about the work each of them was carrying out, in addition to learning from leaders of the international scientific computing community about the cutting-edge tools being used for massively parallel computing in different areas of application.
During PASI, Luis Miguel and the other Mexican participants reflected on the need to disseminate back at UNAM the various topics covered during the institute. Thus, they set out to, each of them, in collaboration with other researchers at UNAM, study in more depth one of these topics and prepare for its dissemination via a seminar at TADMAC. In this first stage of the seminar series, each speaker is introducing the topic and developing simple examples. In a second stage starting August 2011, they will aim to show how the tools and techniques are being used in their own research projects.
They have started a TADMAC Google group, which currently counts 79 members from several educational institutions in Mexico. They also were inspired from PASI to share online all the educational materials developed for the seminars, including videos of seminars. All of the PASI participants from Mexico are currently attending the TADMAC seminars, which draw between 30 and 50 people each week.
Other participants of PASI contributing to the TADMAC seminars include:
- Emilio Zavala Sosa, MSc student in Earth Sciences—he is working on a problem involving Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) applying Newton’s method for linearization of the equations. After PASI, he decided to make use of Python tools, and also FEniCS to solve his problems in parallel with PETSc.
- Daniel Monsivais Velázquez, MSc student in Computer Science and Engineering—he is carrying out a comparative study with CUDA, OpenMP and PETSc for the solution of two-phase flow problems. He currently is refining his measurements using new knowledge acquired at PASI.
- Saúl Piedra González, MSc student in Engineering (Temixco, Morelos)—he is working with the front-tracking method for simulation of bubbles in fluids. He is now using CUSP and Thrust to solve his equations on GPU hardware.
- Michel Rivero Corona, PhD student in Engineering (Temixco, Morelos)—he works in magnetohydrodynamics, and aims to carry out numerical simulations to compare with experimental results. He is also using CUSP and Thrust in his simulation codes.
- Antonio Muñoz Flores, MSc student in Computer Science and Engineering (Cuaititlán)—he is working with the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) in fluid dynamics simulation. He is currently using OpenCL to parallelize his codes.
- Ursula Iturrarán Viveros, associate professor at the Faculty of Science (Mexico City)—she is working in computational fluid dynamics and earthquake simulation, and currently is developing some of her methods with CUSP and Thrust.
Luis Miguel himself is directing a group of experts to develop simulation for oil reservoirs. They are developing (i) a finite volume method, (ii) a streamline-based simulator, and (iii) a finite element method code using FEniCS. In all cases, they are using PETSc and CUDA for the solution of the systems of equations. Luis Miguel is also working on problems of fluid mixing, for which he develops software using generic programming techniques, and is creating CUDA kernels based on CUSP and Thrust.
- Poster of the TADMAC seminar series, listing the topics of the first phase, March-June 2011.