Hello again! I’ve had quite a few talks and media appearances recently, so I figured it’d be good to post the links here so they’re available in one place. I’ll keep this page updated and add links to future talks as they become available, so it should be a fairly up-to-date resource for all your Emily needs!

2023

ARDC Tech Talk: Cross-platform GPU programming without the heartburn

I spoke about GPU programming with Kokkos for the Australian Research Data Commons’s Tech Talks program. I’d been using Kokkos (specifically the package which uses it in LAMMPS) for cross-platform GPU programming since 2020 as part of our PaCER project, since it’s both easy to get started in and reasonably portable between NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, with the promise of easy porting to Intel GPUs if necessary. People had frequently asked me what sort of performance overhead the abstractions in Kokkos incur relative to plain CUDA/HIP but I never had a clean answer, so I decided to write my own benchmarks and investigate. Here’s the link to the recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12l6JBLOVrfALrm1_yKwU2IXtuuH7_tDx/view?usp=sharing.

Show-and-Tell #38 - Emily Kahl

This was a blast! UK-based hardware hacker Attie Grande interviewed me for his Show and Tell series on his YouTube channel, where I got to share a bit about myself and my path to becoming a scientist, my career in computational science (so far), and some cool stuff that I’m working on in 2023 (including a live demo of some code I wrote!). It’s a long video, but Attie was a delight to talk with and had so many keen questions about physics that we just had to keep going. This is one of the appearances I’m most proud of.

SC23: Women’s History Month Feature

I was recently interviewed by Cristin Merritt as part of a series profiling women in HPC. It was great to be a part of and Cristin was a delight to work with, and it gave me a chance to express some long-held but seldom shared opinions on equity and diversity initiatives in large organisations. Cristin’s put together a fantastic series of profiles with some really cool women, so check out the rest of the series once you’ve read mine: https://sc23.supercomputing.org/category/i-am-hpc/.

Cosmos: Simulating Molecule Flow - the Future of Desalination

My boss Debra and I were recently interviewed by the excellent Ellen Phiddian from Cosmos Magazine, talking about our group’s work on doing large-scale simulations of molecular fluid flow. Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics is an extremely important field of classical physics, so when I first started at AIBN I was astonished to learn how much there still is to discover about the fundamental physics of systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. I think we did a good job of condensing down the important physics (although there was one subtle error at the beginning of the video that doesn’t really take away from the message, no need to point it out if you spot it). There’s a video on YouTube and a longer version of the interview available as a podcast.

Pawsey: Enter the flow state — what the atomic world could teach us about the future of batteries and more

Here’s another piece on the fluid flow project. This time we were interviewed by the Pawsey Centre about our work to develop massively-parallel algorithms for molecular fluid flow.

This is distinct from the better-known computational fluid dynamics (CFD): CFD deals with continuous fluids, we’re interested in modelling the motion of individual molecules and how that might affect physical or chemical reactions. These kinds of processes are really interesting because we can potentially use flow to drive self-assembly of carbon nanostructures like graphene sheets with fewer byproducts than traditional chemical manufacturing processes (here’s a cool experimental paper if you want to know more: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ensm.2022.09.026).

Fluid flow is somewhat tricky to correctly model at the molecular level and there’s lots of subtle traps you can fall into when translating it into molecular dynamics code, so we’re aiming to make the One True Implementation and to write it so we can take advantage of modern, heterogeneous HPC architectures. Ideally, we’ll end up with some code that is robust, really fast and open-source. Isn’t that the dream?

2022

The power of scale: unlocking new frontiers in nonequilibrium molecular dynamics with extreme-scale coute:

Talk I gave at the HPC-AI Advisory Council’s Australian conference about my work with AIBN developing high-performance software for nonequilibrium molecular dynamics. This is more of a chemistry talk than a computing talk, but I tried to give a good overview of molecular dynamics for a technical, but non-specialist, audience. This is basically like the Pawsey profile above, but in much more depth.

Shaping Research Software: An Interview With Dr Emily Kahl

I was interviewed by the Australian Research Data Commons’ research software project to promote the role of research software engineering in Australia. I got to talk a little bit about my philosophy for research software development and our high-level goals in my group at AIBN.

2018

Emily’s PhD: Using highly charged ions to explore Atomic Physics

I spoke about my PhD thesis research by UNSW Physics’ outreach and engagement team, way back in the halcyon days of 2018. This is the first talk I ever gave that would be recorded for posterity (as opposed to the many, many live shows I’ve given over the years), and I’m still pretty happy with how it turned out.