Supercomputing Spotlights is a new webinar series presented by the SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing (SIAG/SC, https://siag-sc.org) as part of new initiatives that focus on raising awareness of HPC opportunities and growing the community. The series features short presentations that highlight the impact and successes of high-performance computing (HPC) throughout our world. Presentations, emphasizing achievements and opportunities in HPC, are intended for the broad international community, especially students and newcomers to the field.

Digital Twins: How High-Performance Computing is Personalizing the Future for Complex Systems

• Presenter: Karen E. Willcox, University of Texas at Austin
• Wednesday, April 19, 2:00-2:40 pm UTC (30 min talk + 10 min questions)
  • 7 am PDT / 9 am CDT / 10 am EDT / 2 pm UTC / 4 pm CEST / 11 pm JST
• Participation is free, but registration is required

Abstract: Could you imagine one day having a dynamically evolving virtual replica of yourself that your doctor could use to drive personalized decisions to optimize your health and well-being? In engineering, these personalized dynamic computational models are known as digital twins, and are already being used to drive predictive maintenance decisions for aircraft and aircraft engines. This talk will discuss the high-performance computing and computational science that goes into creating a digital twin, and will discuss exciting new directions for digital twins in engineering, geosciences and medicine.

Bio: Karen E. Willcox is Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Associate Vice President for Research, and Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Prior to joining the Oden Institute in 2018, she spent 17 years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as the founding Co-Director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering and the Associate Head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Willcox's research has produced scalable computational methods for design of next-generation engineered systems, with a particular focus on model reduction as a way to learn principled approximations from data and on multifidelity formulations to leverage multiple sources of uncertain information. She is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of SIAM and Fellow of AIAA. In 2017 she was appointed Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to aerospace engineering and education.