Welcome!
Nano-scale transistors fill warehouse-scale supercomputers, yet their performance still constrains development of the jets that defend us, the medical therapies our lives depend upon, and the renewable energy sources that will power our generation into the next. The Computational Physics Group at Georgia Tech develops computational models and numerical methods to push these applications forward. We accompany our methods with algorithms crafted to make efficient use of the latest exascale machines and computer architectures, including AMD GPUs, Arm/RISC CPUs, and quantum computers. We develop open-source software for these methods that scales to the world’s largest supercomputers. Check out the rest of this website to learn more.
Openings? Visit this page if you’re interested in joining our group.
Examples of our work
Bubble cavitation and droplet shedding are fundamental multiphase flow problems at the core of naval hydrodynamics, aerospace propulsion, and more. We developed a sub-grid method for simulating these phenomena. MFC, our open-source exascale-capable multi-phase flow solver, demonstrates such scale-resolving simulation of a shock-droplet interaction in the above video (via Ph.D. student Ben Wilfong).
The spectral boundary integral method leads to high-fidelity prediction and analysis of blood cells transitioning to chaos in a microfluidic device. This method of simulation provides resolution of strong cell membrane deformation with scant computational resources. We developed a stochastic model for the cell-scale flow, enabling microfluidic device design and improving treatment outcomes. The video above shows a microaneurysm (simulated by Suzan Manasreh).
News
22 May, 2025 Spencer gave an invited conference talk at the joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and International Congress on Acoustics. He talked about the computation of high-amplitude acoustics with application of therapeutic ultrasound and implication of noise.
20 May, 2025 Tianyi Chu’s research on optimal experimental design for soft material cauterization is now on arXiv. We show that if one uses radial basis functions as local interpolants as an intermediate step in the BOED process, the model selection process is accelerated by about two orders of magnitude.
13 May, 2025 Our work on Hadamard-tree tomography via Hadamard Random Forests (HST) appears on arXiv. We show that, assuming real valued output states, one can reconstruct their values in linear time (in qubit count) as opposed to the exponential time of full state tomography. Thanks to our collaborators Bryan Gard (GTRI) and Nico Renaud (Netherlands eScience Center).
13 May, 2025 Collaborative work using information geometric regularization and carefully tuned numerics exceeds 100 trillion grid-points for a rocket-exhaust simulation is now on arXiv. This is the largest CFD simulation conducted to-date, to the authors’ knowledge, in this case by a factor of about 10. Florian and Spencer thank collaborators at NVIDIA, AMD, ORNL, and HPE, as well as the dedicated Ph.D. students.
12 May, 2025 Spencer is in Toulouse, France at the International Conference on Multiphase Flow presenting work on multiphase flow models without discontinuity capturing, joint with Florian Schäfer and Ph.D. student Anand Radhakrishnan.
1 April, 2025 Our work on symbolic expressions and transversal for accelerated and differentiable reacting flow simulation is on arXiv! The method is implemented in an open source package called Pyrometheus and has been linked into MFC.
17 March 2025 We are at the APS March Meeting talking about exascale compressible flow simulation on El Capitan and GPU-based compact finite difference algorithms!
11 March, 2025 MFC 5.0 appears in code and as a preprint manuscript on arXiv! MFC 5.0 is a many-physics multiphase compressible flow solver that scales ideally on exascale machines, including LLNL El Capitan and OLCF Frontier. Read more about the latest features at the manuscript link.
5 March, 2025 We are at SIAM CSE in Fort Worth, Texas this week! Postdoc Tianyi Chu is presenting his work on Bayesian optimal design for discovery of soft material properties.
11 February, 2025 An article on the work of our group and our collaborators on new exascale computers, including OLCF Frontier (mostly) and now LLNL El Capitan, has been published by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.
