PDC Pub 2016

The annual “PDC Pub and Open House” was held on the 3rd of May and was particularly well attended this year. The event started at 14:30 with drinks, snacks, some mingling and a welcome address by our Deputy Directory, Gert Svensson. This year’s Pub featured an inspiring mini-symposium in which a handful of young researchers who are using PDC’s high performance computing (HPC) resources gave fifteen-minute presentations on their scientific work. The symposium was a great success and we intend to continue this as a tradition in coming years.

Five speakers at the postgraduate and postdoctoral levels gave very interesting talks about their research - impressive work indeed! Joakim Halldin Stenlid went first and talked about his research based on electronic structure calculations of surface reactivity. Two talks followed on numerical simulations of airflow: first Elektra Kleusberg presented her research on wind turbines using direct numerical and large eddy simulations, and then Prabal Singh Negi talked about simulations of a pitching airfoil at high Reynolds numbers. After that Petter Johansson discussed his results from large-scale classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations on water droplet spreading on surfaces, and finally Henrik Öberg talked about the fragment molecular orbital theory method and its application to enzyme catalysis.

All of the talks were followed by a number of questions from the audience, and it was apparent that ideas were exchanged between people working in rather disparate fields of research. Roughly 25 people attended the symposium and, although the meeting room was somewhat overcrowded, it was perfect for the occasion. PDC thanks all those who participated, and in particular all the speakers for their outstanding contributions!

After the symposium Gert started his much appreciated small-group guided tours of the PDC computer hall where the Beskow, Tegner and Milner systems are hosted, along with disk and tape storage devices. At the same time, the rest of the visitors and PDC staff enjoyed more snacks, sandwiches and drinks and participated in the pub quiz which featured 13 extremely tricky questions relating to HPC, PDC, and programming languages with references to computers in Hollywood blockbusters. It was an even race with four participants in shared second place, scoring six correct answers (which is statistically higher than a random distribution!), but the coveted prize of a luxurious lunch for two at the Syster O Bror restaurant went to Philipp Schlatter with eight correct answers (which is most likely more than the majority of staff at PDC would score). Congratulations to Philipp! The four silver medallists were awarded exclusive prizes in the form of elegant, yet practical, PDC coffee mugs. The Pub ended at 17:30, although some PDC staff stayed around longer and brought out something stronger from secret places at PDC...