Laura Prieto Saavedra
Description:
When developing and studying new numerical methods, it is often useful to have a simple and reliable computational setup for testing ideas, verifying results and comparing discretizations. In this seminar, we will introduce two implementations to solve a Poisson equation numerically using two well-established open-source FEM libraries for solving PDEs: FEniCSx and deal.II. We will go through the math, the basic problem setup, and the essential components of each code, and demonstrate how they can be easily adapted to more difficult problems (e.g., other boundary conditions, other discretizations, etc.). The goal is to provide a simple, reusable starting point that can be modified for different research purposes.
No prior FEniCSx or deal.II experience is needed. Basic programming experience is helpful, but not required.
Julia Community
Description:
The Julia sessions take place monthly. This is an open and informal meeting for everyone interested in Julia, whether you are just curious about the language, learning or using Julia in your work, or even if you are already an experienced Julia user. The aim is to learn from each other, discuss Julia-related questions and topics, and share experiences, ideas, tips and challenges from using Julia in research and everyday work. In this session, we will briefly go through installing Julia for beginners and discuss the main differences between Julia and other programming languages. Then we will discuss packages and environments, as well as setting up (collaborative) projects. Other questions and topics are also welcome.
Everyone interested in Julia is welcome - no prior experience required.
Laura Prieto Saavedra
Description:
Are you still getting used to the new way of using the servers at the institute? Join us for a practical and informal introduction to HTCondor, where we will see how to launch your simulations in the new way, starting from the basics. Through simple examples, we will run Julia, Python and MATLAB simulations, compare the old and new approaches, and see how easily you can launch multiple simulations without having to manage them one by one.
No prior HTcondor experience needed. Access to the servers is required. Bring your examples or share them in advance, so you can leave with a working workflow for your day-to-day research.
Karsten Tabelow, Veronica Bove
Description:
The new publication server at WIAS (https://archive.wias-berlin.de) is now fully operational. It provides a centralized platform to manage and showcase our research output, including publications, monographs, contributions to edited volumes, preprints and software. This seminar provides an overview of the platform's essential guidelines and benefits, followed by a practical workshop where you will navigate the submission workflow firsthand. Join us to learn how to easily enter your data and upload your own contributions using this new tool.
Julia Community at WIAS
Description:
This session marks the start of the new regular Julia sessions at the institute. They are open and informal meetings for everyone interested in Julia, whether you are just curious about the language, learning or using Julia in your work, or even if you are already an experienced Julia user. The aim is to learn from each other, discuss Julia-related questions and topics, and share experiences, ideas, tips and challenges from using Julia in research and everyday work. There is no fixed agenda for this kick-off meeting: we will get to know each other, exchange ideas about what would be useful for future sessions, and discuss topics that we would like to explore together.
Everyone interested in Julia is welcome - no prior experience required.
Laura Prieto Saavedra, IT
Description:
Brief introduction to HTCondor and the motivation for its adoption at WIAS, followed by an overview of current compute-server usage based on survey and an open discussion on researchers' workflows, concerns, and the next steps of the transition.
Preparation: complete the survey shared via email before attending the meeting.
Patrick Jaap
Description:
Containers are a pretty new topic in the Linux world. They solve a very typical problem in software development: The simulation runs on my computer but crashes on your computer. With containers, you can set up virtual computers and install your software inside. When everything is packed up, you can distribute this virtual computer to other people, or, especially important: to our gitlab CI system to test your software automatically. But wait: we already have virtual machines for this purpose? Yes, but they are a nightmare to set up, and they require an incredible amount of overhead resources. Containers run directly on you own linux kernel, require zero overhead and you can access local data at ease. In this seminar, we will set up a Linux container, install your preferred software and then, let others run your container on their computer.
Prerequisites: a laptop with access to a Bash terminal.
Jürgen Fuhrmann
Description:
This seminar summarizes best practices for organizing Julia research software to make projects reproducible, maintainable, and easy to share. It covers installation and version management with juliaup, editor/REPL workflows and programming tips. It explains environments, when to commit manifests, and how to structure a research project. The talk also presents a project skeleton ready to be used for any Julia project.
Prerequisites: none.
Laura Prieto Saavedra
Description:
This seminar covers the practical basics of licensing software and datasets in a research context. We will explain the purpose of licenses, the differences between copyright, patents, and contributor agreements, and the common license families for code (permissive vs copyleft) and for data (Creative Commons, ODbL, CC0). You will learn how to choose and apply a license, manage third‑party dependencies and understand license compatibility. The session mixes short presentations with examples and introduces concrete internal guidelines that you can follow when publishing software and/or data.
Prerequisites: none.
Nikolas Tapia
Laura Prieto Saavedra
Description:
This seminar introduces the essentials of ParaView for visualizing and exploring simulation and scientific datasets. We will cover what ParaView is and when to use it. You will learn the basics of the user interface and the typical interactive workflow: loading data, applying filters, slicing and clipping, adjusting color maps and scales, probing and plotting data, and producing animations and screenshots. The session combines short demos with guided hands-on exercises.
Prerequisites: a laptop with ParaView installed and working, access to the WIAS Nextcloud, and a mouse (optional but strongly recommended).
Laura Prieto Saavedra, Francesco Romor
Description:
This seminar introduces the fundamentals of HTCondor job submission and the typical workflows used for scientific computing on our local GPU/CPU servers. We will cover the core components of the HTCondor ecosystem, walk through creating and testing submit files, requesting resources (CPUs, memory, and GPUs), input/output data, and using essential command‑line tools to monitor the job. The session blends short demos with guided‑on exercises for simple CPU and GPU examples, and also shows some more complicated workflows.
Prerequisites: a laptop with internet access and a Bash terminal, access to WIAS GitLab, access to the WIAS servers (with key-based authentication).
Laura Prieto Saavedra
Description:
This seminar builds on the basics and focuses on collaborating effectively with others using git. We will cover the pull request (PR) / merge request lifecycle, when to fork vs. clone, opening and reviewing PRs, common merge strategies (merge commits, rebase, squash), interactive rebases and history rewriting, resolving merge conflicts, and recovering from mistakes (revert, reflog, cherry-pick). The session combines short demos with guided hands-on exercises.
Prerequisites: a laptop with internet access and a Bash terminal. git installed and working (verify git --version). Access to your WIAS GitLab account. Basic familiarity with your terminal and a text editor of your choice.
Laura Prieto Saavedra
Description:
This seminar introduces the fundamentals of Git and the typical workflows used for research projects. We will cover what version control is, compare hosted options (GitHub, GitLab, etc), and walk through the common day-to-day commands: initializing and cloning repos, staging and committing changes, branching, merging, and pushing. You will learn how to set up your identity (user.name and user.email) and other useful settings. The session combines short demos with guided hands-on exercises.
Prerequisites: a laptop with internet access and a Bash terminal. git installed and working (verify git --version). Access to your WIAS GitLab account. Basic familiarity with your terminal and a text editor of your choice.
Maximilian Reiter
Description:
In modeling liquid crystals and micromagnetics, holonomic constraints on the relevant physical quantities are common. This talk discusses efficient numerical approximation methods for partial differential equations discretized in time by finite differences and in space by finite elements, using the Python library FEniCSx.
Laura Prieto Saavedra
Description:
A compact, hands‑on seminar that teaches researchers and staff how to access and use our local compute servers safely and efficiently. You will learn what resources are available, how to connect from a terminal, how to avoid repeated password entry by using SSH key authentication, how to check whether a server is available, basic use of tmux for persistent sessions, and the essentials of submitting short jobs to the queuing system used on some servers. After a short demo, attendees will get to try connecting and run a small example task (either interactively or inside tmux) and/or submit a minimal queued job.
Prerequisites: a laptop with a working Bash terminal. Your username, password and two-factor authentication to access the WIAS servers.
Laura Prieto Saavedra
Description:
This seminar introduces the Unix shell and how to use the terminal to perform everyday development and system tasks. This is particularly useful to interact with the compute servers at WIAS. Participants will learn basic Bash commands, filesystem navigation, file and text manipulation, simple process and permission management, and how to combine commands with pipes and redirection. The session is interactive and concludes with hands-on exercises that reinforce the commands and workflows introduced.
Prerequisites: a laptop with a Bash terminal installed. For Windows users: Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) installed with a Linux distribution (e.g., Ubuntu) and a working shell terminal. An installation guide is presented here .
Laura Prieto Saavedra
Description:
This seminar introduces core principles of research software engineering and data management in the context of applied mathematics. It outlines a roadmap for the topics to be covered in the seminar series and invites participants to provide feedback and suggest additional themes to guide future sessions.
