SimCenter Welcomes Dr. Gardner to the Development Team
Published on October 15, 2018
The NHERI SimCenter is pleased to announce the addition of Dr. Michael Gardner to the software development team. Through his postdoctoral researcher appointment at UC Berkeley, he will focus on developing tools to incorporate stochastic loading as well as spatial variability in site conditions. Gardner completed his PhD, MS, and BS in civil engineering from UC Berkeley. His programming experience includes development of a coupled Discrete Element Method (DEM) and Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) program for evaluating the interaction of rock and water leading to rock scour. This application uses the Kokkos Library, developed and maintained by Sandia National Laboratory, to accelerate computations while allowing for performance portability and easier code maintenance. Furthermore, in collaboration with colleagues in the computer science division at UC Berkeley, he developed a parallel, open-source fractured rock mass generation application that runs on Apache Spark, which takes advantage of the scalability of the framework enabling massive analysis runs on Amazon EC2. Both the fractured rock mass generation and coupled DEM-LBM applications are open-source and available on GitHub.
Gardner says that he looks forward to working in the collaborative SimCenter environment, where the development teams shared goal of creating tools that will advance the capability to better understand the impact of natural hazards on both infrastructure and the community is a fantastic opportunity for him as both a researcher and a software developer.
About the SimCenter. The NHERI Computational Modeling and Simulation Center (SimCenter) provides researchers access to next-generation computational modeling and simulation software tools, user support, and educational materials needed to advance the capability to simulate the impact of natural hazards on structures, lifelines, and communities. The SimCenters cyber-infrastructure framework allows collaborative simulations from various disciplines to be integrated, while accounting for pertinent sources of uncertainty. More information about the NHERI SimCenter can be found at https://simcenter.designsafe-ci.org.
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