Speakers

Keynote Speaker:
Mark Shephard, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Biography: Mark S. Shephard is the Samuel A. and Elisabeth C. Johnson, Jr. Professor of Engineering, and the director of the Scientific Computation Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He holds joint appointments in the departments of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering; Civil and Environmental Engineering; and Computer Science. Dr. Shephard has published over 250 papers. He is a fellow in and the past President of the US Association for Computational Mechanics, a fellow and member of the General Council of the International Association for Computational Mechanics, a fellow of ASME and an Associate Fellow of AIAA. He is the editor of Engineering with Computers and on the editorial board of six computational mechanics journals. He is a co-founder of Simmetrix Inc., a company dedicated to the technologies that enable simulation-based engineering.

Abstract: Mesh Control in the Adaptive Simulation of Cardiovascular Flows
Mark S. Shephard, Onkar Sahni and Kenneth E. Jansen
Scientific Computation Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

In recent years, the relationship between hemodynamic factors and arterial diseases has attracted careful evaluation of arterial blood flow and wall shear stress patterns. A central goal of these efforts is to support the ability to obtain patient-specific anatomic and physiological information from imaging techniques and to perform accurate blood flow simulations to predict the effectiveness of alternative surgical procedures. Stanford, Rensselaer and Simmetrix have been working to provide the tools needed to support these activities (https://simtk.org/home/simvascular). This presentation will focus on the development and application of the adaptive mesh control procedures developed to support the adaptive simulation of meshes with millions of elements solved on massively parallel computers.  These adaptive procedure starts with an initial boundary layer mesh and adapt it to match the anisotropic mesh size field defined by directional correction indicators. The local mesh modification operations, are performed such that the structure of the boundary layer mesh is maintained. The results to be presented will demonstrate the importance of properly adapted meshes to effectively determine critical factors such as wall shear stresses and the location of recirculation regions that can arise during the cardiac cycle at diseased locations in the arteries. The results will also show that even with well-controlled adapted meshes, it is necessary to employ meshes of 10’s of millions of elements. 

Invited Speakers:

• Tom Grandine, Phantom Works
  Biography: Tom Grandine is a specialist in geometric modeling and numerical analysis in the Mathematics and Engineering Analysis group in Phantom Works.  His areas of expertise include curve and surface modeling, numerical approximation, splines, and multidisciplinary design optimization.  He has extensive experience in computational methods for both design and manufacturing applications.
  
  Abstract: Geometric Knowledge Capture for Engineering Design and Analysis
  Over the past 20 years, Boeing has made considerable beneficial use of scriptable geometry systems, including AGPS and ICAD. Such systems have the advantage that design knowledge and rules can be captured in the form of executable scripts which can be transferred between engineering groups and reused over and over again. The strategy has proven to be very effective, and it promises to continue to be useful for a very long time. This talk will explore the attributes of such systems in the context of currently available knowledge capture technology and discuss the benefits and shortcomings of the approach. The talk will also describe the GEODUCK project, a Boeing effort begun earlier this year intended to standardize this technology inside the company and capitalize on all that has been learned so far about scriptable geometry systems.
  
  
• Charles Loop, Microsoft Research
  Biography: Charles Loop works for Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He received an M.S. degree in Mathematics from the University of Utah in 1987, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1992. His graphics research has focused primarily on the representation and rendering of smooth free-form shapes; including subdivision surfaces, polynomial splines and patches, and algebraic curves and surfaces. Charles also works on interactive modeling and computer vision techniques. Lately, his efforts have gone into GPU algorithms for the display of curved objects.
  
  Abstract: Approximating Subdivision Surfaces on Tessellation Hardware
  Coauthor: Scott Schaefer, Texas A&M university
  Equipping the GPU with a tessellator unit represents the next step in the evolution of the graphics hardware pipeline. This programmable unit is design to evaluate a user defined parametric surface at sample points adaptively generated by the hardware. Subdivision Surfaces are the standard modeling primitive for arbitrary topology, free-form shapes. Unfortunately, subdivision surfaces are not ideally suited to tessellation hardware.
  
  In this talk, I will present a simple and computationally efficient algorithm for approximating Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces using bicubic patches. For each quadrilateral face of the control mesh, we construct a geometry patch and a pair of tangent patches. The geometry patches approximate the shape and silhouette of the Catmull-Clark surface and are smooth everywhere except along patch edges containing an extraordinary vertex. To make the patch surface appear smooth, we provide a pair of tangent patches that approximate the tangent fields of the Catmull-Clark surface. These tangent patches are used to construct a continuous normal field (through their cross-product) for shading and displacement mapping. This representation is a visually accurate proxy for Catmull-Clark surfaces that is efficient to evaluate on a programmable tessellation unit.
  

• Douglass Post, Department of Defense, High Performance Computing Modernization Program
  Biography: Douglass Post has been developing and applying large-scale multi-physics simulations and leading technical projects since 1967. He is the Chief Scientist of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, manager of the CREATE Program, and a member of the senior technical staff of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. He is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the joint AIP/IEEE publication “Computing in Science and Engineering”.

  Doug received a Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University in 1975. He led the Tokamak Modeling Group at the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory from 1975 to 1993 and served as head of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) Physics Project Unit (1988-1990), and head of ITER Joint Central Team In-vessel Physics Group (1993-1998). More recently, he was the A-X Associate Division Leader for Simulation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1998-2000) and the Deputy X-Division Leader for Simulation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (2001-2003). He has published over 125 refereed papers, 100 conference papers and 10 book chapters on computational, experimental and theoretical physics with over 5200 citations. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Nuclear Society, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
  
  Abstract: A New DoD Initiative: The Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) Program
  The Department of Defense is launching a new initiative: The Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) Program. CREATE is a 12 year program to develop and deploy three sets of computational engineering tools for aircraft and ship design and for the design and integration of RF antennas with platforms. The customers for the CREATE tools are the DoD acquisition program engineers, both government and industry. Each project will include about 35 full time staff from the DoD community (DoD Labs, industry, academia and other federal agencies). The three major projects will be supported by a computational infrastructure group. While the funding will begin in FY08, planning has already started.

  The CREATE goal is to improve the acquisition process by providing tools to acquisition program engineers for use early in the acquisition process, e.g., during concept development and analysis of alternatives before major cost and schedule decisions are made. CREATE tools will be used to detect and fix design defects before major schedule and budget commitments have been made. CREATE tools will also shorten the time required for design, system integration and testing, thus increasing the flexibility of DoD acquisition programs to adjust to rapid changes in requirements. The CREATE program has similar goals and challenges to the Sandia computational engineering program, and an exchange of views and experiences could be valuable for both communities.

  Mesh and grid generation is a key issue for the success of CREATE. If engineers must spend months generating meshes before they can apply high fidelity engineering analysis tools, rapid design development and exploration of design options, design analysis and optimization will be impossible. CREATE has launched a program to identify mesh and grid generation roadblocks, and to develop a plan for reducing the time to generate meshes for the CREATE tools. The talk will discuss the CREATE program in general and the plans for improving the capability to generate meshes for CREATE design exploration, optimization and analysis tools.  
  

Banquet Speaker: Scott Eberhardt
Biography: Scott Eberhardt spent twenty years as a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington, before joining Boeing in 2006.  In 2004, Scott was a consultant with the Museum of Flight, assisting researchers and writers in finding and documenting personal courage stories.  As an aviation history buff and engineer, Scott began researching the engineering changes that occurred during WWI.  

Abstract: Fighter Performance and Technology in The First World War
During the first one hundred years of flight great advances were made in fighter performance.  However, fighter tactics developed in the early years of WWI are still in use today.  A retrospective analysis of Seattle’s Museum of Flight collection of WWI fighters will show why certain aircraft were successful, where others weren’t.    Climb and turn performance of these airplanes are compared and the tactics they fostered will be discussed.  Speed, handling and stall speeds will be discussed in relation to the utility of these aircraft.