About two weeks ago, from 10 till 13 Jan 2022 I was at the annual meeting of the French research group on many-body phaenomena, the GDR nbody. Originally scheduled to take place in person in Toulouse the Corona-related developments unfortunately caused the organisers to switch to a virtual event on …
read moreGdR REST Discussion meeting on Machine Learning
Last week on 9th and 10th December 2021 I participated in the Discussion meeting on Machine Learning been organised by the French research group REST, which is centred around theoretical spectroscopy in solids and molecules. While most participants joined remotely I was fortunately able to travel to École Polytechnique in …
read moreJuliaCon DFTK workshop: A mathematical look at electronic structure theory
From 13th July till 30th July this year's JuliaCon finally took place virtually. The first week (13th till 27th) hosted a number of three-hour live-streamed sessions of workshops, while the "regular" conference with a number of prerecorded talks started on 28th.
After my introductory talk to electronic structure theory and …
read moreVirtual materials design 2021: Black-box density-functional theory methods
On 20th and 21st July 2021 the Virtual Materials Design 2021 CECAM workshop took place virtually. I was excited about this workshop and the opportunity to get in touch with researchers working on high-throughput computational materials design. While I am not actively working in this field the special requirements of …
read moreSSD Seminar: Accelerating the discovery of tomorrow's materials by robust and error-controlled simulations
A couple of days ago, on 12th July, I was invited to present my research in the SSD Seminar Series of RWTH Aachen. Being part of the research training group on modern inverse problems as well as the School for Simulation and Data Science (SSD) the SSD seminars are interdisciplinary …
read moreTalk at many-body seminar at RWTH
On 29th June I was invited to present a short summary of my research at the seminar of the research training group Quantum Many-Body Methods at RWTH Aachen University. In the talk I give a overview over my ongoing work about reliable black-box self-consistent field schemes for high-throughput DFT calculations …
read moreSIAM LA: Robust and efficient accelerated methods for density-functional theory
Just one day after my talk at the SIAM Materials Science conference (blog article) I gave another talk at a SIAM meeting, this time at SIAM Linear Algebra. I was very much looking forward to participate in SIAM LA, firstly because it was the first time I attended this conference …
read moreSIAM MS: Using the density-functional toolkit to design black-box DFT methods
After being moved by one year due to the pandemic, the last two weeks (from 17th to 28th May) the SIAM materials science conference finally took place in virtual form. Unfortunately this meant that the conference was scheduled in parallel to the SIAM Linear Algebra virtual conference, where I also …
read moreTalk at Lüchow group seminar at RWTH
On 5th May I was invited to present a short summary of my research at the local theoretical chemistry research group of Prof. Dr. Arne Lüchow at RWTH Aachen. Because I wanted to give a broad overview of topics that I worked on over the past few years, I did …
read moreDFTK: A Julian approach for simulating electrons in solids
Following my talk at Juliacon about our DFTK code last year (slides, recording, blog article), we have now published an extended abstract in the JuliaCon proceedings, which you can find below. The JuliaCon proceedings use the same open journals software stack to manage their publication infrastructure as the Journal of …
read moreThoughts on initial guess methods for DFT
On Thursday I gave a brief talk in our weekly ACED differentiate group meeting about initial guess methods for starting self-consistent field calculations in methods such as density-functional theory. For preparing the talk I did a little digging into both the standard approaches used by many molecular and solid-state codes …
read moreA novel black-box preconditioning strategy for high-throughput density-functional theory
A couple of weeks ago, from 15th to 19th March, I participated in the virtual annual meeting of the German Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM). For me this meeting was the first time I presented my work to an audience of applied mathematicians with a broad background and …
read moreCESMIX TST meeting: DFTK.jl: A multidisciplinary Julia code for density-functional theory development
These past two days I have participated in the Tri-Lab Support Team (TST) meeting of the CESMIX, the newly founded Center for the Exascale Simulation of Material Interfaces in Extreme Environments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Within the next few years the idea of the CESMIX is to develop …
read moreHigh-throughput density-functional theory calculations: An interdisciplinary challenge
Last Thursday I was invited to give a virtual talk at the Scientific Computing Seminar of working group of Prof. Nicolas Gauger at TU Kaiserslautern. Since the research in Prof. Gauger's group mostly concerns topics which are not directly related to electronic structure theory and density-functional theory (DFT), I chose …
read moreChallenges and prospects of a posteriori error estimation in density-functional theory
Last week Wednesday I was invited to give a talk at the group seminar of the AG Christoph Jacob at TU Braunschweig, Germany. Christoph was especially interested in our recent publication on a posteriori error estimation in Kohn-Sham problems and so I decided to use the opportunity to give a …
read moreMoansi: Inhomogeneous preconditioning for density-functional theory
Last week (24th and 25th September) I attended the 4th annual meeting of the Moansi (Modelling, analysis and simulation of Molecular Systems) work group of the GAMM. I already attended the Moansi meeting last year, where I very much enjoyed both the broad range of talks at the interdisciplinary border …
read moreFaraday Discussions: New horizons in density functional theory
Following the submission of our paper on a posteriori error estimation in the Kohn-Sham equations a few months ago I was recently invited to present our work at the Faraday Discussions on New horizons in density functional theory. Being amongst speakers such as Kieron Burke, Andreas Savin or Weitao Yang …
read moreDFTK: A Julian approach for simulating electrons in solids
Since last Friday I have been attending JuliaCon, the annual conference for the Julia language. Naturally given the current situation the event did not take place "on location", but was instead converted into a virtual event. Albeit the different feel compared to a real-life conference the organisers did a very …
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