This is a 3.5-year Industrial CASE PhD studentship at Durham University, co-funded by EPSRC and EDF Energy. The initial annual tax-free stipend is £17,188. The closing date is for this position is 1st January 2014.
This is a well-balanced and exciting project combining cutting-edge developments in High Performance Computing in Computational Mechanics with a rigorous, experimentally driven, validation exercise. You will be working on implementation and validation of a new, open-source, multi-body simulation code. This task will involve utilization of cutting-edge HPC programming techniques such as ISPC (http://ispc.github.io) and GPI-2 (http://www.gpi-site.com/gpi2/) as well as extensive testing on Xeon Phi enabled hardware platforms. From its industrial end this research is situated in the context of nuclear safety and it is related to the modeling of aging nuclear plant graphite cores. From an academic end this research is concerned with development of numerical techniques suitable for dynamical modeling of large-scale structural systems exhibiting fragmentation, impacts and friction (i.e. non-smoothness).
This position is open to candidates with engineering, mathematics or computer science backgrounds. Candidates must have experience in at least one of the below items, combined with a keen interest in mastering the remaining ones:
- Computational Mechanics (e.g. implementation of the Finite Element Method)
- High Performance Computing (e.g. advanced C/C++ programming, vectorization of computational algorithms, distributed memory implementations with MPI)
- Computational Geometry (e.g. proximity queries, nearest neighbor search)
- Optimization and Non-Smooth Analysis (e.g. work on nonlinear complementarity problems and non-convex optimization)
Good communication skills are essential (you will be delivering quarterly progress reports to our industrial partner as well as sharing your results during conferences and workshops in an international setting). EPSRC student eligibility criteria apply (http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/skills/students/help/Pages/eligibility.aspx).
For further information please contact Dr. Tomasz Koziara (tomasz.koziara@durham.ac.uk) or Prof. Jon Trevelyan (jon.trevelyan@durham.ac.uk) at the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences at Durham University.