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Scientific Software Engineering

If runtime is a problem for your application, then the use of a general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) can be a solution. GPGPUs can sometimes speed up computations by an order of magnitude. As an extra advantage they use far less power per computation. But exploiting their computational power is not always easy and only works for applications that meet specific requirements.

VORtech has been growing relatively quickly in recent years. While we have hired an average of one additional employee per year, we have hired five new colleagues in the past year. Read more about our new toppers Martine, Sander, Mat, Hunter and Edo (from left to right in the photo) in our blog.

These days, technology is becoming so complex that many systems are built in a partnership of specialized companies. This has the obvious benefit of using the best possible knowledge and experience, but it also has pitfalls. Here are six rules, illustrated with our experiences in a recent project.

The launch of ChatGPT made the world aware that Machine Learning will fundamentally change the way we live and work. The field of computing and simulation will be no exception. But it’s not just ChatGPT: there are other innovations from machine learning that are bringing exciting changes for computing. In this blog, we’ll explore the potential of this new technology.

Bas van ’t Hof from VORtech helped brain researchers by building software to compute how drugs spread through the brain. With this software, the researchers can now see what their theoretical work implies, allowing for more efficient drug development with fewer laboratory animals.

The Pi-dag challenge 2023 has three very convincing winners. It was clearly a nice challenge for software engineers with a knack for mathematics. There were some very interesting and surprising solutions. Some made creative use of loopholes in the rules, but all displayed true coding skill.

The 2023 edition in Amsterdam offered a showcase of everything that is going on in the field, from software management, digital twins, and machine learning to impressive applications.

For all scientific programmers out there that enjoy a solid challenge: submit your Python solution for the Pi-day challenge 2023 on April 20 at the latest.

Model-order reduction is a powerful technique to speed up simulations. It can be used to solve performance issues in applications like design optimization, model-based predictive control, or digital twinning. In this blog, we’ll give a very basic introduction to these techniques and describe some experiments that were done at VORtech by two interns at VORtech, Floris Roodenburg and Abinash Mishra. They could speed up calculations by more than a factor of ten.

Building a specialized information system not only requires a developer with domain knowledge, but also a good collaboration between the user and the developer. In this blog, we show how this works in practice, illustrated with examples from a system for monitoring the Dutch coastal waters.