Mukul Dave

As a NESAP for Simulation postdoc at NERSC, Mukul contributes to research software development, enabling and porting codes to make use of exascale computing platforms involving the latest accelerators. Mukul works on the Energy Research and Forecasting (ERF) package, which couples mesoscale atmospheric flows with microscale wind farms, and is built upon the AMReX framework for block-structured simulations with adaptive mesh refinement. The software uses an MPI + OpenMP approach for parallelism over CPUs and an MPI + CUDA/HIP/SYCL interface for GPUs from different vendors.

Mukul completed an undergraduate program in Mechanical Engineering (ME) from Nirma University in his hometown of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India in 2014, followed by a master's in ME from Arizona State University in 2016 with a focus on high performance computing, numerical methods, and fluid-thermal sciences. He worked as an HPC Application Specialist at the Center for Computation and Visualization at Brown University from 2016-18, helping researchers use the shared compute cluster at Brown by providing user support, compiling and benchmarking applications, writing help documentation, and conducting workshops.

Mukul's doctoral research from 2018-22 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison involved simulating cross-flow turbines that rotate on an axis perpendicular to the flow to harvest energy from flowing wind or water. Mukul investigated different turbulence modeling techniques, varying angular velocity controls for increased efficiency, and effect of external conditions such as flow confinement or blockage while exploring the complex physics of dynamic stall at the turbine blade.