Tim Trucano is a member of the technical staff in the Computational Physics Research and Development Department at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The mission of his department is to perform research and development for large scale computational physics and mechanics software and to apply this software to "extreme" computing problems. These implementations use some of the world's fastest computers, including an Intel Paragon supercomputer. One major focus of this work is to apply massively parallel implementations of this software to the solution of important problems of interest to the Department of Energy (DOE). Projects from other funding agencies may also be undertaken. His work specializes in testing and validating this software, in areas such as non-linear partial differential equations for shock wave phenomena.
Tim was recently involved in a project that simulated and analyzed the impact of the comet Showmaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in July, 1994. Some staff members in his department with background in the geosciences became aware of the predicted collision and felt they had the expertise, computer codes, and hardware capability at Sandia needed to computationally study the impact. They were eventually able to obtain National Science Foundation funding to continue the work. It is work such as this which helps keep the Sandia and their research staff members compatible with front line research. This type of "extreme" problem offered an unprecedented opportunity for validating three-dimensional computer codes. Another problem Tim has worked on recently involved applications of shock wave physics to the study of laser-plasma sources for extreme ultraviolet lithography. This problem was originally stimulated by the needs of a joint DOE-US industrial R&D collaboration developing a microcircuit lithography tool that utilizes extreme ultraviolet light. The computer codes and past research on material fragmentation in Tim's group were successfuly applied to this problem.
Tim finds his work at Sandia to be interesting and challenging. As an undergraduate he worked at Sandia for two summers and that colored his attitude toward his career goals. Although that experience helped him to recognize that work at the Lab was done in groups, it still took a while for him to learn to work productively in a group and to realize that the most import thing is to solve the problem. Tim has been with Sandia since 1980, when he completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of New Mexico. He also obtained a M.S. in mathematics and B.S. in mathematics with a minor in physics from New Mexico. Tim feels that the breath of his graduate and undergraduate course work made him more attractive for work at Sandia. It showed that he was flexible and had broad interests beyond his dissertation. Tim believes that his background in mathematics is a real strength for his job. It strengthens his entry into physics literature and directly helps in his work in computational physics.
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