Welcome to my website

• 3’rd Jan, 2005 to 14’th August 2006: Scientist, Computational and Theoretical Fluid Dynamics Division, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore
• 1’st September 2006 to 31 July 2008: Post-doc, Projet OPALE, INRIA, Sophia Antipolis
• August 2008 to present: Fellow, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research: Center for Applicable Mathematics, Bangalore.

• BE, Mechanical Engineering, KREC, Surathkal, 1994-1998
• ME, Aerospace Engineering, IISc, Bangalore, 1998-2000 (SR No. 605198127)
• PhD, Aerospace Engineering, IISc, Bangalore, 2000-2004 (SR No. 115199529)

Member (M16773), Aeronautical Society of India

My primary research interest is CFD and its applications. I am also interested in numerical analysis and numerical solution of PDE in general.

• Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Kinetic schemes
  • Meshless method
  • Finite volume method
• Adjoint equations and solvers
• Automatic differentiation
• Shape optimization
  • Simplex method
  • Particle swarm optimization
  • Metamodelling
  • Adjoint-based
• List of free/opensource codes

If you are a student doing yours Bachelors or Masters and you are interested in any of the above research topics, you have the opportunity to visit TIFR Bangalore for an internship. In summer, there is a Summer Student Research Program typically held during May-July. For more details, see the SSRP website. However, you can write to me any time of the year; based on my availability and other factors, you may be able to visit TIFR for a short training program.

• WILL THE WIND TUNNEL REPLACE THE COMPUTER?
• The Wine Snobs Guide To Flux Functions
• The Fitted Mesh Story...,
• A one-sided view
• The Turbulent History of Fluid Mechanics

• Installation guides: Gentoo on iBook, Gentoo on Thinkpad R40e
• Computing on the Macbook
• Tips and tricks: Bash, Fortran, Scilab, Vim, Latex
• Subversion: Ruby script to manage commits
• Machine precision
• Things which don't fit elsewhere
• Linux cluster in TIFR-CAM

The Open Source Movement has been a great boon for scientific research since it has provided a large number of free software tools, the most important being the GCC compiler suite. Parallel computing systems are being cheaply built using GNU/Linux. Scientific research in a large number of countries would not have been possible without the presence of these free and cheap tools. But the products of these research efforts rarely become open source. Stephane Zaleski examines the motivations of programmers and scientists in this article.

The most dynamic model in software engineering now is provided by the Open Source movement, and lies behind successful projects such as Linux or the egcs compilers project. However it has found little echo in the community of scientists performing for instance advanced fluid-mechanical simulations. There is a relative paradox in this situation: for almost a decade Linux has swept the university computing world, providing a cheap and reliable alternative to the workstations and supercomputers of the past. The compilers and operating systems that academic scientists use everyday are now Open Source software. Most of the same scientists are reluctant to even let others see their code, not to speak of adopting a full-fledged Open Source development model for the software they produce. In this paper I explore the current state of affairs. I try to provide an explanation based on the different ways in which academics and programmers gain reputation. I then advise a change of minds: science should be more open.

Microsoft products including its Windows operating system are plagued by innumerable security holes. This not only puts individual users at risk of losing their data and sensitive information but can also cripple the internet. All responsible computer users must take active measures to safeguard against such security risks by using the many alternative softwares that are now available. In particular, please stop using Internet Explorer. Try Firefox or Opera which are free and better browsers than IE. Of course the best solution is to use a more secure operating system like GNU/Linux or Mac OSX. Just Say No to Microsoft

Better Living Series, by Rajeev Nanda: Anybody who has driven in Indian towns and cities will agree that the traffic situation is getting worse day by day. The number of vehicles keeps increasing and the problem is compounded by the fact that drivers dont obey traffic rules and are totally devoid of any driving etiquette. Lanes seem to be as imaginary as the square root of -1. Getting behind the wheel seems to turn ordinary people into psychopaths. But it doesn’t have to be like this. You can make a difference, that is what Rajeev Nanda wants to tell us through his Drivers Manual.