Location
MC 5501
Speaker
Matthew Knepley, University at Buffalo
Title
The Impact of Mathematics on Meshing
Abstract
Applied Mathematics is the bedrock of the modern revolution in computational science, but it sometimes can be difficult to follow the thread from conception to impact. Here I trace evolution of the PETSc support for unstructured meshing from the original ideas derived from combinatorial topology, to the scalable implementation, to its use in a wide array of computational science and engineering problems.
Bio
Matthew G. Knepley is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University at Buffalo. He received his B.S. in Physics from Case Western Reserve University in 1994, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 1996, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2000. He was a Research Scientist at Akamai Technologies in 2000--2001 in the Distributed Data Collection and Data Analysis groups. Afterwards, he joined the Mathematics and Computer Science department at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), where he was an Assistant Computational Mathematician, and a Fellow in the Computation Institute at University of Chicago, becoming a Senior Research Associate in 2009. In 2015, he joined the Computational and Applied Mathematics department at Rice University. His research focuses on scientific computation, including scalable algorithms and parallel computing, numerical analysis, software development, high dimensional function approximation, and computational geophysics and biology. He is an author of the widely used PETSc library for scientific computing from ANL, and is a principal designer of the PyLith library for the solution of dynamic and quasi-static tectonic deformation problems. He developed the PETSc scalable unstructured mesh support based upon ideas from combinatorial topology. He was a J.~T. Oden Faculty Research Fellow at the Institute for Computation Engineering and Sciences, UT Austin, in 2008, won the R&D 100 Award in 2009, and the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering in 2015 as part of the PETSc team.