Bio: Sanjay Govindjee is the Horace, Dorothy, and Katherine Johnson Professor in Engineering.  His main interests are in theoretical and computational mechanics with an emphasis on micro-mechanics of nonlinear phenomena in solid materials.  He was the winner of the inaugural Zienkiewicz Prize and Medal in 1998 and more recently received a 2018 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize in honor of his lifetime achievements.  For the last two and half years, he has been the PI and co-Director of the NSF NHERI SimCenter at Berkeley.

The NSF Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Computation and Simulation Center (SimCenter) at Berkeley: An Overview

In October 2016, the National Science Foundation awarded the NHERI SimCenter to Berkeley.  The SimCenter is the computational satellite to the eight experimental sites of the NHERI constellation.  Its primary goal is to advance natural hazards engineering through the use of simulation.  The center develops and stands-up open-source software to simulate the effects of seismic, wind, and water loads on structures with a focus on regional assessments of damage at high resolution under uncertainty.  The SimCenter’s work includes both research and educational components.

The SimCenter has just completed Year 3 or its original mandate and now offers a wide selection of user friendly front end applications that permit local as well as HPC cloud based execution of simulations.  Simulations can be of single detailed structural models subjected to a variety of harzards using state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice loading methodologies.  They can also be of a larger regional nature using simpler models and further coupled to forward uncertainty propogation with Monte Carlo methods with or without surrogating.  Engineering demands can be further propogated into damage and loss, downtime and recovery, using Hazus methodologies, FEMA P58 methods, or user provided techniques with our hazard-blind framework.  All elements of the SimCenter’s software are desgined in a plug-n-play fashion to promote detailed research into natural hazard effects with the ability to see impacts on a larger scale.

In this presentation, I will give an overview of the SimCenter’s recent activities and discuss research needs and how researchers can participate in the SimCenter’s activities, along with a preview of upcoming developments anticipated in Year 4

Prof. Govindjee is being hosted by Prof. Garikipati (ME).