PIMS-SFU CSC Distinguished Lecture: Mayya Tokman

Computer simulations of the dynamics of complex systems have become an integral tool of science and engineering. Large scale numerical models of systems evolving over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales are routinely encountered in a variety of fields from fluid mechanics and plasma physics to weather prediction and chemical engineering. Many of such, so-called stiff, systems pose a computational challenge and fuel continuous need to improve the fidelity, robustness and efficiency of numerical time integrators.

Over the past decades, exponential integration emerged as a numerical technique that carries significant computational savings compared to current state-of-the-art approaches. In this talk we will explain advantages exponential methods offer and discuss theoretical and practical aspects of designing and implementing different classes of efficient exponential integrators. We will describe a software package EPIC that contains implementation of efficient exponential methods for serial and parallel computational platforms and illustrate performance gains these schemes provide using test problems and examples from plasma physics and computer graphics.

Biography: Professor Tokman's research is focused on building mathematical models of physical phenomena and developing efficient numerical methods for problems in science and engineering. In particular, she has been developing numerical techniques, which allow fast integration of large nonlinear systems of differential equations with widely varying temporal scales. Professor Tokman has worked on modeling large scale behavior of astrophysical and laboratory plasmas, including evolution of coronal loops in the solar atmosphere and plasma configurations arising in fusion related experiments. Her research interests also include computational biology, in particular, modeling experimental manipulations of biomolecular structure of living cells. http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/mtokman