PyFR Seminar Series

Peter is a Professor in the department of Aeronautics at Imperial College. He works at the interface between mathematics, computing, fluid dynamics, and aeronautical engineering. He holds a 1st class undergraduate degree from the department of Physics at Imperial College (graduating top of the year), a PhD from the department of Aeronautics at Imperial College in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics, and previously served as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. He is a 2016 Gordon Bell Prize finalist, a 2016 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner, an EPSRC Fellow, and has held two INCITE Awards from the Department of Energy. He plays an active role in his community, co-leading the open source PyFR project and acting as a Principal Editor for Computer Physics Communications. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Freddie Witherden studied Physics with Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London between 2008–2012 earning an MSci degree with first class honours. In September of 2012 Freddie started a PhD in computational fluid dynamics in the department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London under the supervision of Dr Peter Vincent and graduated in December 2015. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Ocean Engineering at Texas A&M University.

Freddie's main research interests are in the development of simple and efficient high-order methods for modern CPU/GPU platforms. The primary vehicle for this is the flux reconstruction (FR) approach proposed by Huynh at NASA Glenn in 2007. Using the FR approach it is possible to recover both discontinuous Galerkin and spectral difference schemes along with various new and novel methods. Furthermore, the approach is also extremely well suited to the requirements of modern many-core architectures.