Tech Swarms into Athens for Clean, Old-Fashioned Computing
The in-state rivalry between the Yellow Jackets and the Bulldogs usually heats up when Georgia Tech visits the University of Georgia. However, one Saturday last month, the focus shifted from competition to collaboration.
The Georgia Scientific Computing Symposium (GSCS) held its annual meeting on February 21 in Athens. Since 2009, the event has hosted researchers from across the Peach State to showcase homegrown advances in scientific computing.
The symposium highlighted Georgia’s reputation as a computing innovation hub. People from around the world come to Georgia universities to lead computing research. By advancing science, engineering, medicine, and technology, their work improves communities at home and abroad.
Faculty and students from Georgia Tech, UGA, Georgia State University, and Emory University presented at the symposium. Georgia Tech participants came from the colleges of Computing, Engineering, and Sciences.
This year’s organizers agreed to meet in Atlanta for the 2027 symposium. Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) will host the 19th GSCS.
“From healthcare to computer chip design, scientific computing underpins many of the technological advances we see in our lives,” said Professor Edmond Chow, associate chair of the School of CSE.
“Scientific computing provides the mathematical models, simulations, and data‑driven tools that make modern innovation possible. It allows people to analyze complex systems, test ideas virtually before building them, and make faster, more accurate decisions across nearly every sector of society.”
Professor Haomin Zhou and Assistant Professor Helen Xu delivered two of the symposium’s five plenary talks.
Zhou presented a new method for solving the Schrödinger equation, a landmark equation in quantum mechanics. Drawing inspiration from the mathematics used in generative artificial intelligence models, his approach develops an algorithm that more effectively simulates waves, particle motion, and other physical systems.
Xu focused on improving how computers move and organize data during complex calculations. Her work uses “cache-friendly” layouts that help computers access data more efficiently, boosting performance for scientific and engineering applications.
“Speaking at GSCS was a great opportunity,” Xu said. “The symposium fostered connections within the scientific computing community and gave us a chance to share exciting research.”
The symposium showcased student work through a poster blitz and a poster session. During the blitz, 36 students each had one minute to introduce their research to the full audience. They then shared more details about their research during the poster session.
The student projects showed the range of fields supported by scientific computing. The session also provided attendees with an opportunity to connect and expand their professional networks, helping grow the field’s future impact.
“As an aerospace engineer by training and aspiring computational scientist, GSCS gave me the platform to network with other researchers in the field while showcasing my own research,” said Ph.D. student Kashvi Mundra.
“I was able to connect with scientists across different disciplines whose work intersects with my own in unexpected ways. Those conversations pushed my thinking beyond my own lab's perspective, helping me see my work on physics-informed machine learning for inverse problems in a broader scientific computing context.”
Georgia Tech students who presented posters included:
Abir Haque (CSE), Massively Parallel Random Phase Approximation Correlation Energy via Lanczos Quadrature
Antonio Varagnolo (CSE), Physics-Enhanced Deep Surrogates for the Phonon Boltzmann Transport Equation
Ben Burns (CSE), Infinite-Dimensional Stein Variational Inference with Derivative-Informed Neural Operators
Ben Wilfong (CSE), Shocks without Shock Capturing; Compressible Flow at 1 quadrillion Degrees of Freedom without Loss of Accuracy
Daniel Vickers (CSE), Highly-Parallel Fluid-Solid Interactions for Compressible Flows
Eric Fowler (CSE), High-Performance Tensor Contractions in Computational Chemistry
Haoran Yan (Math), Understanding Denoising Autoencoders through the Manifold Hypothesis: A Geometric Perspective
Kashvi Mundra (CSE), Autoregressive Multifidelity Neural Surrogate Modeling under Scarce Data Regimes
Sebastián Gutiérrez Hernández (Math/CSE), PDPO: Parametric Density Path Optimization
Vivian Zhang (AE), Multifidelity Operator Inference: Non-Intrusive Reduced Order Modeling from Scarce Data
Xian Mae Hadia (CSE), Data Efficiency of Surrogate Models: Learning Physics Data from Full Field Data vs. Inductive Bias from Approximate PDE Solvers
Xiangming Huang (CSE), Neural Operator Accelerated Evolutionary Strategies for PDE-Constraint Optimization
Zhaiming Shen (Math), Understanding In-Context Learning on Structured Manifolds: Bridging Attention to Kernel Methods
Zhongjie Shi (Math), Towards Understanding Generalization in DP-GD: A Case Study in Training Two-Layer CNNs
