New NCSA staff members will help businesses use HPC modeling

by Nicole Schiffer

NCSA’s Private Sector Program (PSP) hired two research programmers, Erman Guleryuz and Madhu Vallakal, to work on the National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium (NDEMC) project. NDEMC helps small- and medium-sized manufacturers use high-performance computing (HPC) to improve their engineering and manufacturing processes.

Guleryuz and Vallakal both come from mechanical engineering backgrounds. Guleryuz’s recent work focuses on finite element modeling, and Vallakal works with computational fluid dynamics modeling.

“HPC problems in mechanical engineering are usually set up as modeling of physical processes,” says Ken Sartain, a project manager with PSP. “Understanding the principles of computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis are critical to properly setting up and optimizing results in such models.”

The new PSP staffers will work alongside NCSA’s Seid Koric and Ahmed Taha, veteran researchers with PSP, to help lower the barriers between small companies and HPC solutions.

Taha says that when prototype testing is not feasible, modeling becomes essential. When prototyping is an option, modeling can still save companies time, effort, and money, he says.

“For small companies, access to HPC is a game-changer since running these simulations is often impractical on personal laptops or workstations,” says Koric.

“We conducted a nationwide search and those two candidates stood out with their skills, excitement about work, and their previous involvement and experience with industry and consulting,” Koric says.

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