🎓 Congratulations Dr. Heinich Porro! PhD Graduation

We are pleased to announce that Heinich Porro has successfully completed his PhD in Computer Science at the Université de Limoges. 🎉

Academic Journey & Background

Heinich’s academic journey has been closely tied to our community. He was formerly a student at the Department of Computer Science (DCC) at the University of Chile, where he completed his Master’s thesis under the supervision of Nancy Hitschfeld in the +Lab in 2017.

During his doctoral studies (Aug 2021 – Dec 2025) at the Université de Limoges, he also contributed to the academic community by co-supervising Master’s projects for students including Hugo Bec, Gabriel Cadhillac, and Claire Morin.

PhD Thesis Research

His thesis project centered on “Dynamic simulations based on 3D Delaunay triangulations.” A major focus of his work involved implementing GPU kernels for 3D Delaunay triangulations using floating-point arithmetic, which ensured numerical stability and effectively managed precision boundary cases in dynamic simulations.

Keywords: computational geometry, real-time simulations, GPU, MD

Abstract

“This thesis explores GPU algorithms for improving the neighbor searching via Delaunay triangulations in dynamic simulations of colloidal suspensions. It bridges molecular dynamics and computer graphics, optimizing fixed-radius nearest neighbor (FRNN) searches, the bottleneck in these simulations. A breadth-first search algorithm was developed for efficient FRNN computation on GPUs in the context of Delaunay-based FRNN searches. A 2D Delaunay-based method was then proposed and benchmarked against classical approaches. The work extends to 3D with both grid-based and preliminary Delaunay methods, including GPU implementations of Voronoi diagram maintenance. Applications include materials science and fluid simulations, where accuracy and performance are critical. The research produced software tools (MCLEAP, GPU-BFS, SOMA-DNS) and laid the groundwork for future studies on 3D Delaunay methods and graph-based FRNN. This contributes to advancing high-performance simulations by combining modeling with GPU parallelism.”

Congratulations! 🎊

The entire group extends its congratulations to Dr. Heinich Porro on this achievement. We look forward to seeing where his research in high-performance simulations and computational geometry takes him next!