Avi Purkayastha joined NREL in 2010 as a senior scientist in the Computational Sciences Center, where he is working on research and development activities across multiple domains and enabling and advancing large-scale NREL application domain codes on high-performance computing (HPC) systems. His research and development activities have included work in the wind, power, data center, batteries and cybersecurity domains, and application support.

Research Interests

HPC systems and applications

Modeling and simulations across multiple domains in different scales and fidelity

Software support, optimization, and engineering

Data science and artificial intelligence/machine learning

Education

Ph.D., Applied Mathematics, Northern Illinois University

M.S., Mechanical Engineering - Thermal Fluids, Colorado School of Mines

Professional certificates in:

• Python
• Data science
• Artificial intelligence/machine learning

Professional Experience

Principal Applications Engineer, SiCortex (2007–2009)

Research Scientist, Texas Advanced Computing Center - University of Texas Austin (2001–2007)

Visiting Professor Computational Science / Research Scientist, Mississippi State University (1998–2000)

Associate Professor, University of Puerto Rico (1993–2000)

Research Assistant, Northern Illinois University (1985–1992)

Featured Work

Can Reanalysis Products Outperform Mesoscale Numerical Weather Prediction Models in Modeling the Wind Resource in Simple Terrain? Journal of Wind Energy Science (2022)

Artificial Intelligence for Data Center Operations (AI Ops), NREL Technical Report (2021)

The North American Renewable Integration Study: A U.S. Perspective, NREL Technical Report (2021)

Automatic DDoS Attack Detection on SDNs, International Conference on Security and Management Proceedings (2021)

An FEM-MLMC Algorithm for a Moving Shutter Diffraction in Time Stochastic Model, Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems (2019)

Holistic Approaches to HPC Power & Workflow Management, 9th International Green and Sustainable Computing Conference (2018)

Development of FAST.Farm: A New Multi-Physics Engineering Tool for Wind-Farm Design and Analysis, Proceedings of the AIAA SciTech Forum: 35th Wind Energy Symposium (2017)

An Analysis of Application Power and Schedule Composition in a High Performance Computing Environment, NREL Technical Report (2016)

Legendre Spectral Finite Elements for Reissner–Mindlin Composite Plates, Finite Elements in Analysis and Design (2015)

Awards and Honors

Best Paper, Development of FAST.Farm: A New Multi-Physics Engineering Tool for Wind-Farm Design and Analysis (2017)  
 
NREL Technology Transfer Award for Outstanding Public Information, SOWFA: Simulator fOr Wind Farm Applications Software (2015) 
 
NREL President’s Award, Outstanding Efforts Helping NREL Users Transition to the Red Rocks and Red Mesa HPC Systems (2010)