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ARSC and UAF Host Free Talks - Updated

FAIRBANKS, Alaska. -- Dr. Agarwal from Wichita State University will be presenting three talks in mid August. Everyone is welcome to attend the Computational Fluid Dynamics Electromagnetics and Semiconductor Device Simulation (CFD/EDS) talk and the General Aviation talk both located on the UAF campus. The General Aviation talk is an evening seminar open to the Fairbanks aviation community.

Dr. Agarwal is the Bloomfield Distinguished Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Executive Director of the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University. He is also the Director of the Aircraft Design and Manufacturing Research Center and a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University. From 1978-1994, he was the Program Director and McDonnell Douglas Fellow at McDonnell Douglas Aerospace in St. Louis, Missouri.

Dr. Agarwal has done pioneering work in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Acoustics, Computational Electromagnetics, and Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the American Institue of Aeronautics and Astronautics, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been the recipient of many awards for his technical contributions.

The updated schedule for these talks is as follows:


Toward Teraflop Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications
Wednesday, August 13th, 10 a.m.
Natural Sciences Building, Room 202

Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
Based Technology to Semiconductor-Device Simulation
Thursday, August 14th, noon
Peking Gardens, 1101 Noble Street
(corner of Noble and 12th)

General Aviation:  Past, Present, and Future
and Status of PA-18 Supercub Tundra Tires Project
Thursday evening, August 14th, 7 p.m.
Natural Sciences Building, Room 202

"Towards Teraflop Architectures, Algorithms and Applications"

During the past decade, a large number of parallel computers have been commercially built worldwide using SIMD or MIMD (both shared and distributed memory) architectural routes to parallelism. However, they have been limited to a peak performance of at most a few gigaflops. Very recently, new systems have been built which offer the
promise of teraflow scalability to solve the so called "Grand Challenge Problems." Cray T3D, IBM SP2, Convex Exemplar SPP1000, Intel Paragon XP/S, KSR-2, and CM5 are some of the machines which fall into this category.

This lecture will review these architectures and their potential for solving large scale problems.
Interplay of numerical algorithms and system software (compiler, operating system, high performance FORTRAN etc.) in fully exploiting these architectures will be discussed.
Selected benchmarks of large scale problems from linear algebra and matrix theory, and Computational Fluid Dynamics will be presented.
The future trends in the development of scalable parallel hardware, parallel system software, and parallel numerical algorithms will be assessed.
In addition, the potential of network computing for achieving teraflop performance will be examined.

"Application of CFD Based Approach to Electromagnetics and Semiconductor Device Simulation"

It is shown that many of the well-known formulations for semi-conductor device simulation, namely the drift-diffusion model, the hydrodynamic model, and the energy transport model which are the moments of the Boltzmann equation for a Maxwellian or non-Maxwellian distribution, can be recast as a set of first-order partial differential equations in conservation law form. As a consequence, the well-developed CFD grid-generation techniques and solution algorithms can be applied for the numerical solution of these equations. However, the gridding and numerical algorithm employed must capture the physics of the problems, and these requirements differ substantially for semiconductor device simulation from those needed for flowfield simulation. In device simulation the grids and algorithms should be able to deal with scales from angstrom to micron and should model accurately the inversion layers. The author has pioneered this emerging application of CFD technology to device simulation. Several examples will demonstrate the power of this approach for semiconductor device and process simulation.

"General Aviation - Past, Present, and Future"

A brief history of General Aviation in the U.S. will be presented. Its present status and future prospects wll be reviewed. The particular focus of this presentation will be on the recently created government/industry/university partnership to revitalize general aviation known as AGATE (Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiments). NASA and the FAA are principal government participants, along with 70 corporate and university members. The AGATE group has established market-driven goals and objectives. The activities of the consortium are conducted through a series of "Work Packages," with the following current areas: Integrated Flight Systems, Propulsion Sensors and Controls, Training and Systems Technologies, Ice Protection Technologies, Integrated Design and Manufacturing, and Air and Ground Infrastructure. The consortium is designed to accelerate the processes for bringing new technologies from the experimental research stage to fully certified production status. Successes have already been demonstrated in the use of advanced satellite GPS-based "highway in the sky navigation" for air traffic control at the 1996 International Olympic Games, and in demonstrations of greatly simplified single power level control for piston engines. The AGATE consortium is poised to provide technical leadership for the general aviation community well into the 21st century.

Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
PO Box 756020, Fairbanks, AK 99775 | voice: 907-450.8600 | email: