Dr. Mario Acosta

Title:  Why HPC and Exascale Computing for Numerical Modelling: The Climate and Weather Perspective

Mario C. Acosta is a leading researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Granada in 2015. He joined the BSC nine years ago and is currently co-leading the Computational Earth Sciences (CES) group, which has over 60 members. Dr. Acosta’s research focuses on High Performance Computing (HPC) applied to Earth System Models. He is the coordinator of the HorizonE ESiWACE3: Center of Excellence for Weather and Climate Phase 3, focused on supporting the weather and climate modelling community to reach a higher readiness level regarding exascale supercomputing and foster knowledge transfer between the different Earth System modelling centres and teams across Europe. In specific, Dr. Acosta is work package leader in HPC tasks related to the development of significant climate projects, such as the climate digital twin in Destination Earth.

Dr. Mike Owen

Title:  Developments in meshfree modeling for multiphysics laboratory experiments, astrophysics, and planetary defense

Mike Owen is a Computational Physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he leads the open-source Spheral meshfree research project.  He received his PhD in astrophysics from The Ohio State University in 1997, where he focused on cosmology and modeling large-scale structure and galaxy formation.  Since joining LLNL in 1997 he has worked on a variety of modeling techniques for studying hydrodynamics, radiation transport, and applications of these sorts of tools to high and low-energy density physics experiments.  Some of these areas include fusion research (particularly Inertial Confinement Fusion at NIF), how best to model fracture and failure of solid materials in a variety of experimental regimes, and more recently (in collaboration with researchers at LLNL, the broader NNSA labs, and NASA) how best to protect the earth from hazardous asteroids, as exemplified by the recent successful DART mission to the binary asteroid system Didymos.  In this talk Dr. Owen will focus on some of the challenges in applying meshfree modeling methods to multiphysics problems, how we have developed our methods in response to these challenges, and show how meshfree tools have helped in these widely varying sorts of applications.

Prof. Javier Bonet

Title:  Stabilised SPH formulations in large strain solid mechanics

Professor Javier Bonet is the General Director of CIMNE since 2022. He was previously Deputy Vice- Chancellor, Research & Enterprise, at the University of Greenwich in London for over 6 years. Prior to that he was Professor of Computational Engineering and Head of the College of Engineering at Swansea University. He has a background in civil engineering, having graduated from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain as a Ingeniero de Caminos Canales y Puertos. In 1986 he moved to the UK to study for a PhD at Swansea University under the supervision of Prof. O.C. Zienkiewicz, one of the leading international figures in the development of Finite Ement methods. He continued his academic career at Swansea University, becoming a lecturer in 1990 and a full professor in 2000. He eventually became Head of School and then Head of College of Engineering, a post that he held until 2015 when he moved to the university of Greenwich in London. Javier Bonet is a highly respected academic, honored with awards such as the SEMNI prize and the Zienkiewicz award. He has served on the UK’s 2021 Research Excellence Framework and editorial boards of major journals. His research, focused on computational methods in nonlinear solid mechanics, has resulted in over 110 publications and more than 6000 citations, with an H-index of 42.