Collin Wittenstein
Collin Wittenstein is an incoming PhD student at MIT's Julia Lab. He is completing dual master's degrees in Physics and Computational Sciences, supervised by Hendrik Ranocha, at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, where he previously earned bachelor's degrees in Physics and Mathematics. His research focuses on high-performance numerical methods for PDEs, with applications ranging from dispersive water waves to geothermal energy systems. He is an active contributor to the general Julia open-source ecosystem, and is the author of GeothermalWells.jl and a co-author of DispersiveShallowWater.jl.
Website: cwittens.github.io
Sessions
Julia offers the best of both worlds: high-level expressiveness combined with low-level performance, allowing developers to leverage modern hardware accelerators without needing expertise in hardware-specific languages. This workshop demonstrates how Julia makes high-performance computing (HPC) accessible by covering topics such as distributed GPU computing, GPU code optimization, and scalable workflows.
I present GeothermalWells.jl, an open-source Julia package for full three-dimensional simulation of deep borehole heat exchangers (DBHEs) and well arrays. Through an operator splitting strategy combining ROCK2, ADI, and semi-Lagrangian methods with vendor-agnostic GPU acceleration, making multi-year well array simulations computationally tractable on a single GPU. Previously considered prohibitively expensive, these simulations open new possibilities for systematic design optimization of geothermal well systems.