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August 11, 2009, 11:00AM
Powell-Booth 120
Jing Qiang Goh, Caltech & National University of Singapore Undergraduate Research Exchange Program
Mentor: Dr. Mark Stalzer Co-mentor: Dr. Ufuk Topcu
We have developed a Matlab-based prototyping toolbox for uncertainty quantification. The underlying uncertainty quantification framework is based on the concentration-of-measure inequalities. We implemented two global optimization schemes, Simulated Annealing and Differential Evolution, for uncertainty quantification. The implementation exploits sources of parallelization at the optimization level and within uncertainty quantification. Our toolbox offers a user-friendly interface and a robust optimizer for uncertainty quantification on physical models.
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On January 6, 2009, Caltech’s Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response of Materials was recognized by the National Nuclear Security Administration for its decade-long contribution to computational science and engineering. The Caltech center was one of five university centers in the Academic Strategic Alliance Program of the NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program (ASC).
The ASC program has provided significant funding for Caltech and CACR since 1998. Dan Meiron, ASC center director, accepted a Certificate of Service from Dmitry Kusnezov from the NNSA, “for your steadfast dedication and leadership in advancing the field of computational science and engineering by using high-performance computing … to elevate the state of technology of materials design through the Virtual Test Facility’s capability to simulate the dynamic response of materials under intense loading conditions.” The Caltech center’s work included constructing a proof of concept for a Virtual shock physics Test Facility in which the full three-dimensional response of a variety of target materials could be simulated for a wide range of compressive, tensional, and shear loadings, including those produced by detonation of energetic materials.
Caltech’s ASC ASAP center’s success was key in securing a role in the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP).
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With a $17 million grant from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the California Institute of Technology becomes one of five new centers of excellence that will focus on the emerging field of predictive science. Predictive science is the application of verified and validated computational simulations to predict the behavior of complex systems where routine experiments are not feasible. The research effort, which involves Caltech and four other selected PSAAP centers, will focus on unclassified applications of interest to NNSA and its three national laboratories: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories.
Michael Ortiz, the Dotty and Dick Hayman Professor of Aeronautics, professor of mechanical engineering, and director of Caltech’s new Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP) Center, says Caltech will focus its efforts on the high-energy density dynamic response of materials, with demonstrations of hypervelocity impact response.
Hypervelocity impact is central to a number of scientific and application areas, including the design of protective shields for space structures and the understanding of meteorite impact cratering. Accurate computer simulation is critical to the understanding of experiments that involve velocities reaching 10 kilometers per second, pressures in the megabar range, and extraordinarily high temperatures and deformation rates.
The executive director of Caltech’s PSAAP Center is Mark Stalzer, executive director of Caltech’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR). The PSAAP Center will coordinate activities in areas including computational fluid dynamics, led by Dan Meiron, the Jones Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Computer Science; computational science and engineering, led by CACR’s principal computational scientist, Michael Aivazis; experimental science, led by Rosakis; solid dynamics and materials, led by Ortiz; and uncertainty quantification, led by Houman Owhadi, assistant professor of applied and computational mathematics and control and dynamical systems.
> Read more at the Caltech Press Release or the original NNSA release
