Steve Plimpton Sandia Home

I'm a staff member at Sandia National Laboratories, a US Department of Energy lab. For many years I was in the Parallel Computational Sciences group. In 2001, I moved to a new Computational Biology group. In 2007, I became part of the Scalable Algorithms group.

My work involves implementing and using scientific simulations designed for parallel supercomputers. Often this includes the creation of efficient parallel algorithms. The applications I work on typically use particles, finite elements, or partial differential equations. Some of these simulation tools are now being applied to biology problems.

  • Current interests
  • Past projects
  • Publications
  • Software for download
  • University course in parallel computing

  • How to reach me
  • Humorous quotations
  • Related Sandia links

    Current Interests

    Molecular Dynamics (MD):
    Cell Modeling - particle-based reaction/diffusion models for biological cells
    Pizza.py Toolkit - Python-based toolkit for simulation setup, analysis, plotting, viz
    Genehunter - parallelization of genetic linkage analysis
    ChISELS - surface evolution model of semiconductor processing for micromachine devices (MEMS)
    Radiation Transport - Boltzmann equation for thermal and X-ray radiation
    Parallel Algorithms:

    Past Projects

    Parallel Computing - general overviews
    QuickSilver - particle-in-cell (PIC) relativistic electromagnetics
    PRONTO - finite element transient dynamics (crash & boom) with contact detection
    NIMROD - plasma simulation of tokamaks
    MPPs versus Clusters - performance comparisons of different parallel machines
    Electronic Structure - quantum mechanics of solids
    Direct Simulation Monte Carlo - low-density reacting flows via particles
    Image Processing - synthetic aperture radar (SAR) analysis
    Grain Growth - Potts model on 2-d and 3-d lattices
    Electron Microscopy - Monte Carlo trajectory simulation

    How to Reach Me

    sjplimp at sandia.gov

    Scalable Algorithms Dept, MS 1316
    Sandia National Laboratories
    Albuquerque, NM 87185-1110

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