FABRIZIO BISETTI
PhD Student
Hesse Hall Room 246
UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
fbisetti@newton.berkeley.edu

BIO

I'm a graduate student at the Mechanical Engineering Department here at UC Berkeley. I earned my MSE at the University of Texas at Austin in August 2002, and I'm now working towards a PhD. As you might be able to tell from my name, I'm Italian. In fact Italy had me for almost 22 years before I decided to catch my train and "go to Texas". During these years I attended high-school first and finally an engineering school in Milano (Politecnico di Milano), where I earned my BS in ME.

Here at UC Berkeley, I'm part of Dr. J.Y. Chen's Combustion Modeling Lab (CML), which has its headquartiers in Hesse Hall, just between McLaughlin, and McCone. Obviously we deal with combustion processes, for which we strive to build models. In particular, my focus is on turbulent combustion.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

On his death bed, Heisenberg is reported to have said, "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first."

As defined by Hinze [1], "turbulent fluid motion is an irregular condition of flow in which the various quantities show a random variation with time and space coordinates, so that statistically distinct average values can be discerned". On top of this complicated random fluid dynamic process, which has puzzled the brightest minds in the last century, add highly exothermic reactions between the species in the flowing mixture (usually methane, hydrogen, and some oxidizer like air), and you'll get turbulent combustion, in which up to many hundreds of species are flying around, while interacting with one another.

In particular, my research is geared towards the development of simple, yet accurate combustion models to be implemented on top of relatively mature fluid dynamics numerical schemes (Large Eddy Simulation), capable of capturing the interesting features of the flow fields. More precisely, in collaboration with Dr. J.Y. Chen, we are aming to ameliorating and embedding the unsteady flamelet approach (combustion model) into an LES code (fluid dynamics). Unfortunately, to resolve combustion processes of any real interest to combustion device designers, a LOT of bookkeeping needs to be done. Such chore has to be undertaken in 3D geometries and in time, hence, in four dimensions.

Needless to say, High Performance Computing is a inevitable necessity in this high end applications, if any project is to be carried out in a reasonable amount of time. Parallel computing then becomes an obvious answer.

GOALS FOR CS 267

As a student and researcher in combustion modeling, I wish to learn the basics of the parallel computing world like architecture options, performance evaluation, software developemt, and software portability, which I believe are essential knowledge to an end-user of parallel computing. Hence, I hope to acquire awareness of the computing options available. I hope also to develop skills in parallel programming, which will be a requirement in the future for any researcher in combustion modeling, who wishes to run his codes in a HPC center.

COMPUTER SKILLS

My current platform experience include Windows (user), and Linux (friendly). My coding experiences include knowledge of C, FORTRAN 77/90, but unfortunately, I don't have any experience in parallel computing.