Exascale Challenges in Plasma and Astrophysics
Presenter: Frank Jenko
Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Germany
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
fsj@ipp.mpg.de
As we move towards the exascale era, there are numerous opportunities for major breakthroughs in computational science. This is true, in particular, for plasma and astrophysics. In my talk, I will focus on two frontiers in this context: fusion energy research driven by HPC and our understanding of turbulent dynamics in the universe, from the solar wind to black hole accretion disks. This will include general lessons learned which are also applicable to a wide range of other areas in computational science.
Frank Jenko studied physics at the Technical University of Munich. On taking his PhD he joined the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Germany in 1998 as a research scientist. After visiting terms in the USA he took his lectureship degree at the University of Ulm in 2005 and took charge of a Junior Research Group at IPP, working on the simulation of plasma turbulence on high performance computers. In 2014 he joined the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Director of the Plasma Science and Technology Institute. As of January 2017, he is Scientific Fellow and head of the Tokamak Theory Division at IPP. His awards include a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (2011), the Hans Werner Osthoff Plasma Physics Prize awarded by the University of Greifswald (2004) and the Otto Hahn Medal conferred by the Max Planck Society (1999). He has co-authored about 200 peer-reviewed publications and given more than 100 scientific talks.