Verified Exascale Computing for Multiscale Simulations

The purpose of the VECMA project is to enable a diverse set of multiscale, multiphysics applications — from fusion and advanced materials through climate and migration, to drug discovery and the sharp end of clinical decision making in personalised medicine — to run on current multi-petascale computers and emerging exascale environments with high fidelity such that their output is “actionable”. That is, the calculations and simulations are certifiable as validated (V), verified (V) and equipped with uncertainty quantification (UQ) by tight error bars such that they may be relied upon for making important decisions in all the domains of concern.

The central deliverable is an open source toolkit for multiscale VVUQ based on generic multiscale VV and UQ primitives, to be released in stages over the lifetime of this project, fully tested and evaluated in emerging exascale environments, actively promoted over the lifetime of this project, and made widely available in European HPC centres.  

Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Dr Derek Groen - I am a Lecturer in Simulation and Modelling at Brunel University. I'm also an Emeritus Fellow for the EPSRC-funded 2020 Science Network, a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Centre for Computational Science at University College London. I completed an MSc in Grid Computing at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 2006, and a PhD in Computational Astrophysics both at the UvA and Leiden University in November 2010. After my PhD I worked as a post-doctoral researcher on EU projects about distributed multiscale computing (MAPPER) and high-performance computing towards the Exascale (CRESTA). I received a 1-year position as a Fellow of 2020 Science in January 2015, and funded myself for two months through an EPSRC eCSE to work on new approaches for domain decomposition. I joined Brunel University in September 2015 to become a Lecturer and I currently collaborate in the EU ComPat project about multiscale computing towards the Exascale. I have published >20 peer-reviewed journal papers in venues such as IEEE Computer, IEEE CiSE, Journal of Computational Science, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A., Physics Review E., the Astrophysical Journal and eLife. In addition, I was second author of the first ever feature article in Advanced Materials, which was on multiscale modelling of clay-polymer nanocomposites and received news coverage from the Daily Telegraph and the BBC. I currently run Science Hackathons to efficiently establish new interdisciplinary collaborations.

Related Research Group(s)

Computer Science for Social Good - Our group works with partners in the Global South to lead and promote interdisciplinary research in the field of computer science and social good. We focus on investigating and developing new ways and innovative technologies to address challenging socio-economic problems.

Modelling and Simulation - Investigating how modelling and simulation can be supported by research into high-performance computing, e-infrastructures, cyberinfrastructures, cloud computing and web-based simulation.

Project last modified 28/03/2022