Simone Silvestri

I am a computational fluid dynamicist with a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) fellowship at Politecnico di Torino and a Research Affiliate at MIT, where I keep collaborating with the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA). I spend most of my time convincing GPUs to simulate the ocean — and occasionally the ocean cooperates.

I am a core developer within the CliMA organization, where I work on Oceananigans.jl and ClimaSeaIce.jl, and I am a co-owner of the NumericalEarth organization, which aims to build a community around GPU-based tools for Earth system simulation in Julia. I built the dynamical core and numerical schemes that allow to run mesoscale-resolving climate simulations on relatively modest hardware, which is a polite way of saying I optimized things until the electricity bill became the bottleneck.

Before the ocean, there was fire. I obtained my PhD from Technische Universiteit Delft in 2021, working on turbulence-radiation interactions in high-temperature flows and developing a fast GPU Monte Carlo method for radiative heat transfer coupled with DNS. Turns out, the leap from simulating furnaces to simulating oceans is shorter than you would think — both involve turbulence, GPUs, and a healthy disregard for easy problems.