October 2006
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ASC Salutes
Editor’s note: Each quarter, the ASC Program will feature the outstanding contributions of one of its numerous tri-lab scientists, engineers, and administrators. This month, we proudly present Dr. Anthony Giunta.
Tony Giunta giving a presentation on Verification, Validation, and Quantified Margins and Uncertainties at a recent joint US-Russian Federation workshop for scientists and engineers. (April 2006)
Dr. Anthony (Tony) Giunta is a technical staff member in the Validation and Uncertainty Quantification Department within Sandia National Laboratories’ Engineering Sciences Center. For seven years, Dr. Giunta has been involved in a wide range of ASC-funded projects that span the research, development, and application spectrum. Early in his Sandia career, Dr. Giunta performed research on advanced optimization and uncertainty quantification (UQ) algorithms that were implemented in the DAKOTA software toolkit. Over the past three years, he has been focused on applying UQ methods to engineering and scientific problems of interest to DOE and DoD. Primarily, his UQ applications work has focused on the Qualification Alternatives to the Sandia Pulsed Reactor (QASPR) program, numerous stockpile performance assessment studies for NNSA’s Defense Programs office, and several work-for-others projects involving DOD. In addition to his UQ applications, Dr. Giunta collaborates with staff from Sandia, LANL, and LLNL to create and apply methods for the quantification of margins and uncertainties (QMU) in assessing the surety of the stockpile. Dr.Giunta describes his UQ/QMU work as delivering a “best estimate plus uncertainty, not just a single ‘point estimate’ of system performance.” Tony credits the ASC Program with creating the environment in which these important stockpile surety questions can be addressed. “The ASC Program has put tremendous capability and capacity computing into the hands of our technical staff. The challenge we now face is determining the best mix of high-fidelity (capability) computing and medium-fidelity (capacity) computing for each project, in order to deliver a ‘best estimate plus uncertainty’ that is on-time and on-budget for our customers.”
Dr. Giunta is engaged in a broad array of research and applications involving engineering of complex systems. His research interests include multifidelity physics modeling techniques for engineering system uncertainty quantification and design optimization. This is a multidisciplinary field that combines engineering systems design, applied mathematics, statistics, and computer science. This research directly supports Dr. Giunta’s engineering applications work, which involves high-consequence, computationally challenging national security problems of interest to the DOE and DoD.
Dr. Giunta is an expert in the field of multifidelity and multidisciplinary engineering design optimization, and in the use of high-performance computing resources for engineering design. He has participated in numerous invited technical panels and workshops covering these topics, and he is the author of over 50 technical publications including 11 peer-reviewed journal publications. Dr. Giunta is a member of the Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, as well as the Activity Group on Optimization and the Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Prior to joining the technical staff at Sandia, Dr. Giunta was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in residence at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. His postdoctoral research focused on sensitivity analysis methods for high-fidelity, coupled-physics aero-structural aircraft models. He earned a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering in 1997 from the Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. His dissertation research investigated the use of statistical modeling techniques in multidisciplinary aircraft design optimization.
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