CECAM Summer School in Retrospect

From 12 to 16 September 2011, the Jülich CECAM Node organized a Summer School on Fast Methods for Long-Range Interactions in Complex Systems at JSC. Around 37 participants from 14 countries came to learn about state-of-the-art methods and algorithms for efficiently solving the Coulomb problem. Lectures and tutorials on this pervasive topic were held by experts from the universities of Bielefeld, Chemnitz, Mainz, Stuttgart and Wuppertal as well as by experts from JSC.

During the week, morning sessions were devoted to the mathematical principles, algorithmic implementations and parallelization issues of each method. The latter comprised simple cut-off methods, Fourier-based methods, mesh-based Maxwell solvers, multigrid techniques and mesh-free techniques, such as the Barnes-Hut tree method, and the fast multipole method FMM. This theoretical material was complemented by hands-on sessions, including introductions to parallel programming models like MPI, OpenMP, and P-threads and performance analysis tools, followed by practical applications of the above Coulomb solvers contained within the recently established ScaFaCoS library.

The attendees came from a broad range of disciplines (engineering, astrophysics, biophysics, plasma physics, soft matter physics) and had the opportunity to present their own scientific work during a poster session. The diversity of the participants' scientific backgrounds combined with their strong interest in the methods covered by the school (some of which were developed at JSC) is testament to the interdisciplinarity of computational science activities at JSC. The Lecture Notes are available as a publication in the IAS Series at http://hdl.handle.net/2128/4441.

(Contact: Dr. Godehard Sutmann)

from JSC News No. 198, October 2011