The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay is organizing an Institute Colloquium today, September 6, 2022. The details of the lecture are given below:

Title: Drik Ganita: Towards realistic simulation of complex systems

Speaker: Dr. Santosh Ansumali, Professor at Engineering Mechanics Unit at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) Bangalore and Founder of Sankhyasutra Labs, Bangalore

Abstract: The emergence of any new technology often provides an opportunity for new players to displace entrenched established players. We believe the need for simulation of complex systems in modern petascale computing infrastructure along with algorithmic developments over the last two decades in computational physics has provided an opportunity for a new generation of scientific softwares. I take this opportunity to discuss a modern version of Needha's question: "How could Galilean science come to birth in Pisa but not in Patna or Peking?" While ancient India saw an algorithmic revolution and modern India saw a service-driven software revolution, why have we not seen the emergence of new tools and algorithms from India in scientific computation? Can a new generation of tools provide the old Indian dream of drik-ganita aikya (the identity of the seen and computed)?

I take this opportunity to discuss these questions in the context of my learning of mesoscale methods in fluid dynamics. Over the last three decades, a new approach to solving non-linear and non-local Navier-Stokes equations was developed in terms of a discrete space-time kinetic theory known as the lattice Boltzmann model (LBM). In this approach, an attempt was made to build thermodynamics in a discrete space-time setting. The hope was that a self-consistent discrete theory would also lead to better numerical tools. These methods also explored memory bandwidth limited code often encountered in fluid dynamics as a question of constructing a new family of the structured grid. I will also highlight how such ideas can be explored further to answer other algorithmic questions. For example, how Maxwell's Demon is also a perfect pseudo-random number generator. Finally, I would describe how these ideas culminated in a startup Sankhyasutra Labs, where the aim is to develop a new class of computational tools which can perform high-fidelity simulation of multi-physics applications encountered often in modern engineering design processes.

About the speaker: Dr. Santosh Ansumali is a Professor at Engineering Mechanics Unit at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) Bangalore.  He is also the founder of Sankhyasutra Labs, Bangalore and was its CTO in year 2019-2021. Before his stint as a Professor at JNCASR, Dr. Ansumali was an Assistant Professor between 2005-2009 in the department of chemical and biomedical engineering at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He did his B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from the Bihar Institute of Technology in 1998 and his M.E. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 2000. He received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Polymer Physics, Department of Materials, ETH Zurich in 2004, and completed his postdoc from the Department of Energy Technology, ETH Zurich, in 2005. Dr. Ansumali's research interests include mesoscale simulation Methods, kinetic theory and high-performance computing. In particular, his focus in the last decade was the development of the entropic lattice Boltzmann method for the simulation of fluid flows. This formulation is regularly used in commercial as well as popular open-source codes such as palabos and openlb.

His group has helped create a large-scale code for direct numerical simulation of hydrodynamics using lattice Boltzmann method. These efforts led to the creation of SankhyaSutra Lab and its multiphysics simulation platform. His work in COVID19 research and planning was an important starting point for India's supermodel for COVID19.

Dr. Ansumali is a recipient of CNR oration award 2022, A.P.J Abdul Kalam HPC Award by HP-CRAY in 2020, Ramanujan fellowship in 2009 and ETH gold medal in year 2004.

Dr. Santosh Anusmali is the first-ever recipient of the 'IIT Bombay International Award for Excellence in Research in Engineering & Technology'. The award includes a cash prize of Rs.10 lakhs & a citation.