Tenth International Conference on Preconditioning Techniques for Scientific and Industrial Applications

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports travel and participation for 15 US-based students and postdoctoral scholars to the 10th International Conference on Preconditioning Techniques for Scientific and Industrial Applications, which will be held July 31st to August 2nd, 2017 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The conference itself has support from the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences (PIMS); this award is co-funded by NSF CISE CCF and MPS DMS. Scientific and engineering analysis and simulation tasks are often modeled as large systems of equations to be solved; increasingly, these are solved by iterative methods that refine initial guesses. Preconditioning techniques bias the refinements for faster convergence -- they can use quite deep mathematical connections to the sparsity and structure of the matrices that represent the equations. These Preconditioning meetings gather participants from academia, research labs, and industry. (E.g., due to location and topic, a large group are expected from Boeing in Washington.) The resulting mix of participants leads to a healthy exchange of ideas ? with practitioners bringing new, harder, problems to the fore as well as specialized algorithms for handling them, while the algorithms developers and theory researchers emphasize analysis and rigor in what they present. This interaction benefits students who may consider careers in any of these areas.