Pui-Kuen Yeung
Professor P.K. Yeung joined the aerospace engineering faculty at Georgia Tech in 1992, after a post-doctoral appointment at the Pennsylvania State University. He has held the rank of professor since 2005, and has been a professor of mechanical engineering (by courtesy joint appointment) since 2010. He has held visiting appointments at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (department of physics) and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (department of mechanical and aerospace engineering). Professor Yeung is a world-class expert in direct numerical simulations of turbulent fluid flow, with a particular interest in intermittency, mixing and dispersion, and in the development of massively parallel computational algorithms which have enabled simulations of the largest size known at the present time. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and several major national supercomputer centers. He has given invited lectures in Germany, India, Israel, and Japan, and has participated in extended research visits in Australia and the United Kingdom. According to the Web of Science his work has been cited nearly 3500 times, with an h-index of 36 as of early 2019. He has been a reviewer for various archival journals and funding agencies. He has served on advisory bodies convened by NSF in the area of advanced cyberinfrastructure. Professor Yeung recently served as chair of the local organizing committee for the 71st Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, in 2018. He has worked with the American Association for the Advancement of Science in offering summer internships for undergraduate students with disabilities.
Professor Yeung teaches aerospace engineering classes at both undergraduate and graduate levels, including in aerodynamics, viscous flows, and turbulence.
Professor Yeung's research interests are focused on incompressible turbulence, including similarity scaling, extreme events, Lagrangian intermittency, dispersion, mixing, as well as electromagnetic forces; and the pursuit of fundamental understanding via direct numerical simulations at the highest resolutions feasible at a given time. He has been active in the computational science community, and has received large resource allocations at many national supercomputer centers, including currently those at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Yeung's research is primarily funded by the U.S National Science Foundation, including fluid dynamics and cyberinfrastructure programs. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He and his group have developed GPU algorithms on the world's first exascale computer and used them to perform a world-record direct numerical simulation of isotropic turbulence represented by over 35 trillion grid points.
Major Research Interest
- Direct numerical simulations of turbulence in canonical geometries
- Turbulent mixing with low, medium, or high molecular diffusivity
- Lagrangian studies of turbulent mixing and relative dispersion
- Isotropic and anisotropic turbulence
- Rotating, magnetized, and stratified turbulence
- Algorithms for massively parallel computation at extreme scales
- Heterogeneous computing using graphical processor units (GPUs)
Disciplines:
- Aerodynamics & Fluid Mechanics
- AE Multidisciplinary Research Areas:
- Large-Scale Computations, Data, and Analytics
B.Sc(Eng.), Mechanical Engineering, 1980, University of Hong Kong; M.Phil., Mechanical Engineering, 1984, University of Hong Kong; Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, 1989, Cornell University;
First prize paper in engineering division of IBM Supercomputing Competition (1989); INCITE Award, US Department of Energy Office of Science (2004,2010, 2012, 2017, 2018, 2019); Fellow of the American Physical Society (elected 2006); Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (elected 2013)
- R Uma-Vaideswaran, J Romero, DL Dotson, D Appelhans, PK Yeung, A Peak Performance Model for All-to-all on Hierarchical Systems and Its Applications, Proceedings of the SC'25 Workshops of the International Conference for High …, 2025
- PK Yeung, K Ravikumar, R Uma-Vaideswaran, DL Dotson, ..., Forced isotropic turbulence at Taylor-scale Reynolds number 2500: structure functions and acceleration statistics, Division of Fluid Dynamics Annual Meeting 2025, 2025
- R Uma-Vaideswaran, PK Yeung, Numerical study of Lagrangian velocity structure functions using acceleration statistics and a spatial-temporal perspective, arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.17078, 2025
- Yeung, P.K., Ravikumar, K., Nichols, S. and Uma-Vaideswaran, R.
GPU-enabled extreme-scale turbulence simulations: Fourier pseudo-spectral algorithms at the Exascale using OpenMP offloading. Computer Physics Communications, Vol.~306, 109364, 2025. - Yeung, P.K. and Ravikumar, K.
Advancing understanding of turbulence through extreme-scale computation: Intermittency and simulations at large problem sizes. Physical Review Fluids Vol.~5, 110517 (2020)