SC09 Early Adopters Ph.D. Workshop: Building the Next Generation of Application Scientists

Christopher Butler and Sarah Clark

Two PhD students from the Faculty of Engineering have been awarded a travel grant by the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI) to cover the cost of their travel expenses to attend the SC09 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, in Portland, Oregon, USA and present their work.

Christopher Butler from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is conducting his PhD in “In-silico analysis of the effect of shear on thrombus growth” and Sarah Clark, also from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is studying the “Fluctuating hydrodynamics in confined suspensions of swimming bacteria”.

The program committee has accepted 33 proposals for posters from students applying computational modelling, high performance computing and new architectures to a range of fields including the life sciences, geodynamics, imaging, physics, fluid dynamics, water management, aerospace engineering, seismic modelling and astrophysics.

High performance computing (HPC) has become an essential tool to study real world problems of significant scale or detail, and is now applied in a wide range of fields. However, successfully applying HPC can be a challenging undertaking to newcomers from fields outside of computing/computer science.

For example, a graduate structural biologist might not be thoroughly aware of parallelisation techniques, data management strategies or visualisation approaches.

This workshop provides graduate students who are adopting HPC an opportunity to present early stage research and gain valuable feedback. A panel of expert reviewers with significant experience will be invited to come and critique students’ work and provide constructive feedback. The goal of this workshop is to help students identify shortcomings, introduce new approaches, discuss new technology, learn about relevant literature or define their future research goals.