Wolfgang Bangerth, Ph.D. 
Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Texas A&M University

Over the past 20 years, there have been two landmark shifts in computational science and engineering The transition from sequential to parallel computing, and the emergence of very large libraries that provide a huge amount of functionality to application programs in much the same way as MATLAB does for many tasks that can be written in the language of linear algebra. Unfortunately, while the codes written in many applications areas are well parallelized today, they have only recently started to be based on existing libraries.

In this webinar, I will explore what led to these libraries, what they offer, and how they can help communities write codes that are far better, faster, and less complex, yet utilizing far more complex algorithms, that are smaller, better tested, and better documented. Our software, the open source library deal.II (see www.dealii.org), is used as an example to exemplify these benefits and its application to geodynamics. While this talk will focus on deal.II as the underlying library, the following talk in this webinar series, by Timo Heister, will focus on an application built on deal.II, the mantle convection code ASPECT.

[All 2012-13 webinars] [YouTube]

1. Bangerth
2. webinar
3. 2012