School of CSE Seminar Series: Esteban Cisneros-Garibay

Speaker: Esteban Cisneros-Garibay, assistant professor at the University of Tennessee
Date and Time: February 27, 2:00-3:00 p.m.
Location: Coda 114
Host: Spencer Bryngelson

Title: Symbolic Abstractions Enable Exascale Simulations of Reacting Flows and Automatic Differentiation

Abstract: Accurate simulations of reacting flows require a computational representation of the chemical source terms. Dedicated libraries can provide such representations, acting as interfaces between mechanistic data and flow solvers. However, libraries form a fragmented computational landscape, designed to satisfy one application (e.g., combustion or plasma chemistry) and target specific computing hardware. These considerations preclude the simulation of multi-chemistry flows such as plasma-coupled combustion, automatic differentiation, and joint optimization of flow solvers on modern hardware such as GPUs. A symbolic representation of the chemistry is developed to address these challenges. At the symbolic level, conflicts across applications and hardware vanish. The representation is language and library agnostic, transformed through code generation to enable performant GPU execution and automatic differentiation. The Pyrometheus suite implements the proposed approach. Its capabilities and performance are demonstrated for combustion, plasma, and thermonuclear chemistry. The implementation supports existing HPC frameworks, enabling exascale simulations of reacting flows with the state-of-the-art flow solver MFC.

Bio: Esteban Cisneros–Garibay is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Space Institute. His research focus is on high-speed chemically-reacting turbulent flows, using computational methods. He obtained his PhD in Theoretical & Applied Mechanics at The University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign in 2021. From 2021 to 2022, he was Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University, and then a data scientist at Bayer AG until 2025.