Kevin, thank you so much for taking some time to talk to me, allowing me to go birding with you and your mentees from Flynn Elementary. Tell me a little bit about this course that you're taking now that you have allowed me to participate in, and I understand this isn't your first time. Definitely. So, birding for change at the top by Trish O'Kane is my favorite course I've ever taken at UVM. It's just a way to get outside and engage kids outside. It's not about really necessarily teaching them things like, oh, what is this and what does it do. It's just an opportunity and an experience for them to look around them and be able to make those observations for themselves, and be able to see something and ask what is that, why is that the way that it is. But I took this class kind of on a whim in the spring of my sophomore year, so incorporating birds and nature outside with kids. I thought that could be something that would be fun, and it became my whole world. So tell me a little bit about that whole service learning component and how you think it helps you as a college student from an academic perspective.  Like this is my classroom, like this is what I want it to be like going forward, not just in this class. This semester me and a couple of my friends have basically worked really, really hard to set up a chapter, and UVM now has an Audubon chapter. It's one of the first chapters out of college around the nation, and we're really passionate about getting kids outside, getting kids birding of course, but also not only having that opportunity to recreate and enjoy, but to really learn and get an educational experience out of that as well. And that's what it's all about, and so you know our focus is student success for our college students, but you're also committed to student success at the elementary and middle school level as well. Do you know what the next step is after the new year? I have an idea. I really do want to pursue environmental education. At the grad level, that's kind of my plan. I don't know quite where that's going to take me, but so long as it takes me outside, and I get to still be able to interact with kids, I think that's going to be my number one thing. Well, we're so glad that you made the choice to come to UVM, and I know you're giving back already in so many ways, and I'm going to keep my eye on you. Thank you.


The River State chapter of the All Progressive Congress, APC, has accused the state governor Nesom Weke of electoral banditry in the just congruence concluded governorship and state house of assembly election. In a statement by the APC chairman and secretary Meka Beke and Darrington Waudru, respectively, the party noted that the election was smart with intimidation, thoughts attack, hijack of electoral materials, killings, and other electoral offenses. The APC also alleged rigging, masterminded by thoughts, allegedly working for the People's Democratic Party PDP in Cuneivans with the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, and the police. The party expressed sadness that about four of its members died during the election, adding that two were still missing as at the time of the report. As a party, we have repeatedly raised the alarm about how Governor Weke using state resources that belong to reverse people, compromise key institutions like the INEC and the police. What happened on Saturday was a systemic institutionalized rigging of the elections by Governor Weke with the so-posed empire, INEC, and the police actively doing the beating of Governor Weke. However, there were notable points of concern. Members of our observation mission, personally observed violence and voter suppression in numerous voting locations, we witnessed and received credible reports from other observation missions and civil society organizations of vote-buying and voter intimidation, the destruction and hijacking of election materials, and the general destruction of the process in numerous states, including Lagos, Enugu, and Rivers. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


If you've heard my high-intensity training talks before you've heard me talk about the importance of training intensely Training briefly training and frequently. So I'm going to make that part of it real short The biggest mistake that most of these people make is they're not training hard enough They're doing too much exercise and they're doing it too often Most people make the assumption that when they're going into a gym If they just go through the motions, if they make the weight go up and down the number of times Somebody told them to and as many sets as somebody told them to Doing the repetitions a specific way and they do the right exercises with the right frequency That they are going to get bigger and stronger, leaner if they're following whatever diet has been prescribed But regardless of the program, regardless of what exercises you do or your set and rep scheme Regardless of any particular repetition cadence or method If an exercise is not done intensely enough, none of that stuff makes any difference at all When you're exercising, what you are trying to do is send a message to your body That your environment is placing a demand on it that exceeds its current capabilities So that it is a threat to your ability to move If you can't move, you can't obtain food, you can't prevent yourself from becoming something else's food Movement is absolutely essential for survival And as a result, our bodies have adapted, revolved mechanisms for adapting to any kind of stress that threatens our ability to move Starting with the muscles and then with all the supporting systems But adaptations cost energy, adaptations cost resources And your body is not going to expend resources, it's not going to expend energy to produce an adaptive response unless it is threatened Because having that extra tissue is costly Expending the energy could be costly if food is not readily available in the environment Again, all these adaptations are things that we would have evolved during a period of time where energy was very valuable Not like now, you just walk down the street to the supermarket and grab food whenever you want it Your body is not going to produce a costly adaptation unless the long-term benefit of that adaptation is worth more than the expense of producing it If you are trying to send that message to your body, then what you are doing during the exercise has to be demanding enough that it is a threat to your ability to move It has to fatigue your muscles to the point where you are momentarily incapable of further movement Most people don't get close to this point during exercise If you watch most people in the gym, they'll pick up a barbell or they'll get in a machine and they'll start doing the movement And when it begins to burn, when they start breathing heavy, when it starts to get uncomfortable, they stop and they think that's fine They'll move on to the next machine or they'll rest a couple of minutes and do another set If you stop when it starts to get uncomfortable, you're not asking your body to do anything that it can't already do If you stop and then you're able to do it again after a short period of time, then you haven't done it hard enough that you're really threatening your body's ability to move afterwards Now you don't have to go to that point, but the closer you get to it, the better your results are going to be from exercise So when you are doing an exercise, again regardless of the specific exercise, regardless of your reps or anything else One factor that is more important than any other in determining whether or not you send a message to your body to produce the improvements is how hard you're pushing yourself How close you're getting to that point where no matter how hard you're contracting, you cannot continue the exercise in good form It is going to hurt if you're doing it correctly You're going to experience burning If you're doing it right, you should be breathing pretty heavily It is going to be extremely uncomfortable If it isn't, you're not doing it correctly But all of this is temporary It is ultimately harmless if you're doing the exercise correctly, you shouldn't be injuring yourself either And if you really want to improve badly enough, then you will suck it up and push through that And just deal with the momentary pain But that's the biggest thing When you are doing an exercise, you start to feel that discomfort And your muscles and your heart and everything else are screaming at you to quit You keep going anyways And you keep going not until you don't want to do it anymore Not until you think this is enough You do it until you absolutely cannot do another repetition


at the dying end of 1943, the leaders of America, Britain and the Soviet Union had met in Tehran. There to speak for their peoples, collectively to plan, collectively to devise the great three-front offensive of 1944. As the year began, in the Far East, while the British and Chinese fought in Burma, American power struck in the Pacific. This was quadrillion, up in the marshals. This was, and we talk, westward, ever westward, this was Palau, up from the south as well. This was Biak, into the very strongholds, into pre-war Japanese territory, Saipan. The American bastions that Japan had taken, Guam. The price was paid in dead, in blood, in terror. This man is blinded. We who are alive and have our eyes, a year from now, we must tell him what we have done with the world for which he lost his eyes. 1944, in February and March, the Red Army broke the German lines in the Ukraine and swept forward 300 miles to the Romanian borders. Here are the Germans who will never fight again. Spring, 1944. In their great British bases, the Western armies were massing the guns, the shells, the tanks, the trucks, the planes, the food stocks, the gasoline, spare parts, field equipment, mine detectors, medical supplies, and troops. And the troops, British, Americans, Canadians, Indians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Dutchmen, Holes, Norwegian, Czechs, and Danes, troops of the United Nations. Troops who are the stuff of any invasion, troops who on their unassuming shoulders carry the whole world's hope for liberty. At Supreme Headquarters, General Eisenhower gave the word on Monday, June 5th. The vast fleet taught for battle puts out into the darkening sea. Now with exaggerated caution, they are going into attack. They are going into the seawalls, the barricades, the trenches, the guns, the vast emplacements that Rommel had called impregnable. They are going into the crossfire in mine beaches between Caen Barfleur on the northern coast of France. Troops have not yet landed on the beaches. This is the landing, this is it. We are going in, and with this stroke, the people of Europe so long mute will speak, kids are down, the first fires are dying. The first thrust in the Great Battle of the West has been driven home. Sands, Nazi-dominated Europe at the start of 1944. But in this one year, the Red Army in the east, the Allies in the south and west have marched from Cassino to Fianza, from Kiev and Leningrad to Budapest and Warsaw, from Cherbourg to the Rhine. And freedom came to people of half a dozen nations. And with freedom, controversy and problems to be solved with their own free hands. Rome, June 5th, 1944. August 22nd, 1944. Forest, August 31st, 1944. The Soviet allies were driving forward. The West again, Brussels on September 3rd, 1944. 1944, 1944 to Athens. Freedom after years of suppressed faiths and shackled hopes. Grace is free. When the guns fall silent, Athens will be ruled by the law and government that Athens chooses. By the summer, the United Nations were able to attack the problems of peace. Their representatives met at Dunbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. In August at Quebec, Prime Minister Churchill came for a meeting with President Roosevelt. They had to plan new moves, political and military. And in that summer of liberation, the people of Europe spoke so that the whole world listened. It was their war. They put new blood into the meaning of the word freedom. In America, the people spoke. President Roosevelt was re-elected. Both he and his opponents had agreed that America must this time take her place in the Council of Nations. In the factories, the people spoke. Turning out the planes, the guns, the ships, the equipment still needed for the people's war. Well, the war was not yet won. On the 16th of December in Western Europe, the Germans, gathering their remaining power, struck back. It was a sharp blow at the heart of Belgium. It was their answer to six solid months of defeat. But as the year ended, the attack was ground down, pushing against the mass weight of a light power it slowed and wavered. In the new year, the Allied advance will continue. War is not yet won. In the Pacific too, we have come a long way. Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Tarala, Inuitok, the Admiralties, Biak, the Marianas, Palau, Moratai, and now the Philippines. We attack. Troops landed on Leyte, cutting the Philippines in half, threatening to cut all Japanese communication between her homeland and what remained of her conquered empire. General MacArthur and President Osmeido of the Philippines returned to 44, brought to a fuller realization many of our purposes. Our leaders have met again and again to speak for us, the people. And at the end of this year, President Roosevelt spoke many of our hopes when he said, the tide of battle has turned slowly and inexorably. We pray that with victory will come a new day of peace on Earth in which all nations of the Earth will join together for all time. May that spirit live and grow throughout the world in all the years to come.


Hey, what is up? My name is Rubidium. Today, we are looking at this light, the Falconize RX-36TDX. It is a sort of light cloth LED panel. I'll leave it at 1% for now, 2% at 5600, so you can kind of like illuminate me here. Basically, I saw these guys at NAB and was really interested in it. Just strips of LED sewn into sort of like a velcro-vaft piece of cloth. So the light can get very small obviously, because you can just roll it up. You can have this cool thing where it comes with these sort of like stretch your arms, like stretching a canvas that you fold up and put into the back of it. And creates a rigid body that you then can add a lightbox to. You can add diffusion, you can add n-create to to control spill. It comes with a ballast slash dimmer that lets you control the intensity and also lets you go from 3000K to daylight. Dimmer also has a V-mount battery mount on the back and then the power pack which comes with a brace that then fits into the dimmer if you want to combine them. I feel like this light is best used not with all the accessories to make it like a giant 4x4 Kino. It would probably be like a 5x8 Kino or something if it was stretched out. But I've been using this light in a way that I really haven't been able to use any of the lights, which is, you know, gaffer taping it to the ceiling, taping it to walls. It comes with these very cool kind of grommeted LED tabs so you can attach them by a velcro to the side of the light and then hang it over a door or hang it in a window. It really is just like having a piece of cloth diffusion that then has this epic output. You can see by the size of the dimmer on the power pack that it's pretty bright. It's a 240W power supply and it also comes with a little remote control. So, say you do manage to stash this up into the ceiling somewhere, you don't have to manually have control of the dimmer. You can do everything, change the color and the brightness from where you are in front of camera or, you know, down at the floor. Basically, this is a super bright, super large light source, but it still, you know, weighs next to nothing, right? You could have this battery pack on your belt or in a backpack and walk around at night with this thing if you wanted to give Phil to a subject like stay behind camera and act as a moving Phil. The fact that all of this goes into this small little flat case is amazing too. It's not actually carbon fiber, it just has a carbon fiber pattern to it, but since there's nothing really in the light itself that can break, it's all very flexible LED. It's not going to, it's going to be fine to fly with. This light is kind of indicative of what's happening in the film industry right now, which is all these new players are coming in. Everyone's either reducing the cost of lighting and cameras and lenses, or they're finding a whole new form factor for that to work. And, you know, this kind of thing, even two years ago, you would have had to get a light gear, light mat for, and they cost back then $3,500. You can get this thing on Amazon right now for like less than 800 bucks. Considering the amount of the size of the light and the brightness of it, it's like, you know, unbelievable. That's my review of the Thalcanize RX 36 TDX. Check out the links in the description and I'll see you next time.


Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining. I'm Kellan Betts. I'm a course lead here in the MicroMasters MITx MicroMasters Program in supply chain management at MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. I'm very excited to be here today and co-hosting with my colleague, Laura Aleya, also a course lead in the MicroMasters program. And today we're very fortunate and super excited to have Annalise Cabrera, a managing director and partner at Accenture. Welcome, Annalise. Thank you. So if you've joined us before for these webinars, we'd like to kick things off with a poll. And so if we could launch that first poll here, I'd like to know a little bit more about our audience. So question, why are you here today? Some of the options I want to learn about distribution networks. I'm interested in knowing more about use of data as an enabler for network design. So if you could please just take a quick moment and thought that poll, we'd love to learn why you're here today. And while we do that, my colleague, Laura, will go through the agenda for today. Thank you, Kellan, and welcome, Annalise. I'm very happy to have you here today. So during the next 15 minutes, Annalise will discuss real-life considerations when designing and operating a distribution network. Of course, this will be in the high-tech industry, but it will be applied to all. She will cover from the layers of complexity in modeling that network to the importance of selecting the right partners to make it work and the role of technology and data management in this process. Kellan and I will then ask some questions we have prepared for Annalise. And we will save time for your questions at the end, of course, as we usually do. So start thinking on those. And please use the webinar Q&A feature to ask your questions. Be sure to be logged in with a name because we will not read any anonymous questions. So thank you for that. And be prepared to participate. And before moving on, I will check on the poll results. So if we can end the poll and show the results, that would be great. And let's see what our audience is here for today, Annalise. So it seems like most people want to learn about distribution networks. So that's great. We are going to address those. They are also interesting of the use of data on the distribution networks and generally expanding supply chain knowledge. So I think we have a little bit for everyone here. And that's great. So with that in mind, I think we're ready to kick it off, Annalise, right? Yeah, I think we're ready. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here. As Laura said, well, actually I can't share this. I'm a managing director within Accenture and part of the supply chain practice based out of Seattle. And currently I mostly work with high-tech clients. So I will be mostly focusing on that industry today. But again, I work with distribution networks with other industries. It's just today I happen to focus on high-tech. Okay, so the topic is how do we turn network models into action? I would like to start saying that every single object that we have around us has a distribution network story, even art. So if you look at the picture that I have in this screen, it's actually a picture I took in an exhibition. It's an exhibition of around 2,000 little rods. One of the things to think about like, how do they actually move this? Like they move all these little rods all the way from California to Zurich. So it made me realize like really like, someone had to take the decision on how are we gonna package these rods because art is very like fragile, right? We need to keep certain temperatures so these rods don't melt. And really like all of these decisions take a play when we start deciding distribution networks depending on the product. In a specific for high-tech, I wanna talk about the fact that a lot of the companies are already finding their distribution networks with one thing in mind. And that thing is building the resiliency that they need. The reason why this is happening and this might not be news to you is I think there are three forces happening in the market. One of them being after the pandemic, there was a lot of semiconductor constraints and a lot of these industries rely on it. Right now there's actually, at some point there was a surplus and then there is already a constraint again. So it's very volatile. But the reality is that the demand for these semiconductors is exponentially growing. So when you think about like for example, the cloud infrastructure that it's needed to run a lot about a lot of the chat GPT promise that Microsoft made, these semiconductors will be needed to deploy all that compute that they will need for chat GPT. Cars need the same semiconductors. The computers need the same semiconductors. So it's really something that is in high demand and that a lot of industries are relying on. So really companies need to be resilient in phase to a lot of the political dynamic that are also happening, which is the second force. It's probably not news to anyone that there is certain dynamics between China and the different countries. And a lot of the supply of those semiconductors come from there. So a lot of policies are changing, right? Like the U.S. making a very large push to have now cheap manufacturing in the U.S. to reduce the reliability that we have in other countries. So that's a second force. But the third one is, and this one is very interesting. I was reading that the center of gravity of exports of goods hasn't changed in the last decade but now it's forecasted to change in the next five years. Actually, Africa is taking a larger role or it's forecasted to play a larger role. And if you see China, it's forecasted to reduce its presence in those exports. All of this matters because again, as we think on where things are gonna be moving from, we need to think where are we gonna be positioning the different warehouses? How are we gonna be moving all of these different woods around the world knowing that the center of gravity is also changing? There is also implication of, for example, cultural implications, right? Like you will have to learn to do business in other countries. So it's really like a perfect term, if you will, that as supply chain practitioners can start thinking about when we start setting up these distribution networks. One thing that makes it very interesting and I think when I started my career, this was not the mindset at all, is that there are new forces that need to be taken into account when designing distribution networks. So there is a mindset shift of our decade that we all here in this room will have to face. One of them is the commitment to sustainability. And when I talk about sustainability, I don't necessarily only refer to emissions. I also refer to ethically sourcing the raw materials that we have. And even like making it economically sustainable for the communities that we work with. I was actually recently last week in a symposium and one of the founders of this chocolate factory was talking to me about how he's working with suppliers or with farmers in Madagascar. And he basically set up, like he risked a lot of these farmers to work in the manufacturing facility and he's literally working with the whole community to make it sustainably economically for them to have that facility with them and using their cacao and all of that. So it's really thinking beyond the normal parameters that we as supply chain practitioners used to think which was cost and service and being fast. I think now we do have more responsibility in the decisions we made and more commitment to the planet. So that's something that we will need to take into account as we think about these distribution networks. As I mentioned, the second one is the source of diversification and that is really driven by the fact that that center of gravity is changing. So at the end of the day, if the center of gravity is changing, we also wanna diversify the number of supplies we play with. We don't wanna have all our eggs in one basket. We really wanna have resiliency and redundancy across the supply chain. That comes with a lot of implications where are you gonna be setting up your different distribution nodes? And also the whole concept of economies of scale kind of breaks because before you will think I have to consolidate because that helps you fight a lot of the constraints in the market. Now with all of these implications you actually need to start diversifying intelligently. The third one, which is a new parameter that we have to play with is the trade-off between the service and cost but also the emissions. I'm sure that Jose in the last session talk a little bit about the sustainability piece of it and really like the measurement of CO2 but emissions will play a big part specifically the transportation networks. And I know there is like a whole transition into electric vehicles and really having this transition to an infrastructure but we need to think that even with that infrastructure batteries of those vehicles don't last that much, right? So you will need to consider that the vehicle will be downtime for a period of time while it charges again. A lot of that infrastructure is just being built. We don't know where those nodes are gonna be. So there are many things coming our way that when we started defining these distribution networks will be interesting to manage. So it's a perfect place to be I think supply chain at the moment because we will have to deal with all of this. And I think this decade, this is the type of constraints we will need to live with. Having said that, I wanna walk you through a case study in Latin America. That case study didn't necessarily have all of these constraints because I did that a couple of years ago but it just have a lot of the concepts that you guys are learning in the course. So that's why I wanted to bring this case study. It was very applicable to the realities of that company. And then I also wanna tell you how did they end up deciding what network to use? So as you probably have learned there is this concept of the total land debt cost, right? Where you take into account the cost of holding the inventory, the cost of moving, the cost of the warehouse itself and everything it's an algorithm and it optimizes depending on service levels that you need and the cost that it's associated to that service level. We initially use that model to have an idea on if we were to decide how many warehouses we need, basically the algorithm will tell us. Before I go there, I forgot to mention this is a cell phone device distributor. So I had the opportunity to already find the distribution network from the scratch. So we literally could say you need only one warehouse or you need 10 warehouses or whatever really needed, it was from scratch. So the algorithm will always tell us like you only need one. But what I can tell you is given the realities of the country, one was not the answer. And the reason behind that is there was a lot of unit implications. They were actually running 11 warehouses. So it's not like they could just shut down all of a sudden and say, oh, we're just moving to one, right? The other piece is in the case that you moved to one eventually, within that sector, if the union at some point protests, then you need to have redundancy to distribute from somewhere else. So there were other implications that we have to take into account in order for us to make the decision. But what I can tell you is that we had very clear criteria from the start on what was a good distribution network and what was the criteria for us to determine that that's the way that we wanted to move forward according to the strategy that the company has. So as I said, the total amount that costs did play a large part just because we could model from a cost perspective how much that's what was gonna cost. But it was not the only factor. As part of this work, we also had opportunity to define or decide with what 3PL partners and what transportation partners we were gonna be playing. Here is where it starts getting tricky, right? Because in order for you to identify who you're gonna work with, it really depends for what channel. In this case, they were distributing the cell phone devices in B2C channels, B2B, and then they do have own stores. So each one of the channels has a completely different requirements. So at the moment of us assessing, for example, the warehouse partner, we needed to take into account that each operation is different depending on the channel. And also there is an extra cost associated to certain requirements, right? For example, if you wanted to go to B2C, there was a requirement that the customer needed to pay in cash. So whoever is distributing that device, the money management is something that no one wants to do. So it becomes more expensive. It becomes a more expensive channel. So even when the greatest team of things, we said like we only need one and if we just look at the total numbers, this is the best partner and we only need one, the reality was that looking at the requirements of the channels informed a lot of, maybe we need these three additional partners that can help us play in these other areas of the country just because they know how to move product in that country, in that area of the country. There were also dangerous areas that they needed to have experience with and those lines or those distribution lines tended to be more expensive as well. So again, the channel search mattered a lot on deciding what partner we were gonna work with not only from the workhouse perspective but also from the transportation side. As I said, there was the reality of the optimization or the outcome of the optimization versus what the country was leaving and there we had a clear scorecard and we knew like these are the things that we're willing to compromise and these are the things that we're not. So that was pretty straightforward with them just having clarity on that. And as I mentioned, that selection of the trial and transportation partners was not only about the cost, it was also about the level of experience that they had trading this product but also even how they contractually or wanted to work with the company was relevant, right? Because there were certain quotes that will be, I have a fixed and if you only do this fixed then it costs you X but when you add these value added services I'm gonna charge you separately and there were others that were included. So all of this to tell you that when you create the total landed cost it's not as straightforward as just plugging numbers. It's really has to do with the data that you have to play and you have to make certain assumptions because it's never gonna be perfect but it's not as straightforward as one thing like you receive data there are different types of quotes you cannot compare one versus the other what does this quote include? Can I take this call to just like plug it in the model and see what happens? Like it's not like that I think there is a lot and that's where we all play. There is a lot of thinking on can I really compare a quote of a transportation that it's dedicated for certain region versus another one who quote me, I don't know I will give you five trees but then if the fuel changes and I will charge you more depending on the price of the fuel. So that's another type of modeling. So in the baseline everything was compared apples to apples but the plugin of the numbers matter a lot on how we interpret the data. So with that being said I just wanted to let you know that all of these concepts that I learned at MIT did help me to establish a conversation with the client and also be able to decide the best network for them but I can tell you that a lot of the real considerations happen and it's just what it is and we all will have to go and face it. So that's fun. Awesome. Well, thank you guys. That's a fascinating presentation. I love the context of just the challenges that we face in global supply chains and the opportunity I guess that presents for us as supply chain professionals and those who are learning and evolving in this space and so on. Super exciting awesome. Appreciate your presentation. So I wanted to kind of be focusing on a little bit building on your case study presented there and kind of that extra calculus if you will that goes into that sourcing decision or that network design and then also that sourcing decision. You mentioned that there's often multiple partners or players, all three PLs, technology partners, transportation partners as well but the warehousing as well. I'm wondering, even all those different partners that's kind of a complex ecosystem you mentioned that some might have specializations for example, like in geography but they're also like is that technology interface between all those different partners. So carrier has to be able to talk to the warehouse TMS for example, all those kinds of considerations if you could expand on that technology interface or that information flow if you would train all those different and how that kind of comes into that calculus how you would maybe then make those selections and design that network. Yeah, that's a very good question. So actually before we went into the RFP one thing that we made sure as with the client was that we had clarity on what pieces of the order to cash cycle we wanted to outsource, right? Because there are different models that you can establish with a TPL like they can run you from the planning like they can run you the entirety of the supply chain if you allow them to when you will have to pay the cost but I think before we even launch an RFP we will literally say what pieces are we willing to outsource what pieces are we requesting my partner to have in that case actually we were requesting them to have the WMS and then we requested them to have the TMS in case of the distribution one but also we wanted to pay to them this is the inputs that I'm gonna give you and these are the outputs that I want from you. I think having clearly from the start on like what are the exact flows that you expect with your partner clarify a lot not only for them in when they quote you because there is typically like a quotation for the systems piece but it also reduces the complexity on trying to integrate everything and trying to have the status of your order all the time. I think we're clear on like I wanna have a status at this point or when I receive inventory I wanna see it in my system reflected with this SLA so having that from the starting that order to cash cycle was like key. When we've allotted the technology of the partners majority of them will have very standard tooling I think it has more to do with the company itself depending on the industry companies have different maturities and majority have a lot of like in-house developed and that's what makes it very complex to plop into another system but again, if you have clarity on exactly where are you gonna feed them and then where are they gonna feed you back it should be very straightforward. I never saw a partner in the RFP that we did that didn't have solid technology it was more of us on saying are we ready to receive it this way? Are we ready as a technology team we're in the company to actually plug what we need which is most of what needs to happen like the responsibility of enabling that but I can tell you that most of the partners have what we requested them but that clearly helped. Awesome, thank you for sharing that Annalise and I'm now thinking like in this implementation of the network models and how important it is to consider all these layers of complexity and we think usually of them was multi-dimensional models and as we usually teach it or learn it it's more about adding elements to the objective function and making it a multi-objective function or probably just adding things like constraint. So probably we've learned that a constraint could be the number of miles that we're going through in terms of the carbon emissions those miles will generate or adding carbon emissions to our objective function and an additional thing beyond coast or surface level but we were wondering how do you actually make it work because you have mentioned there are other items like ethically sourcing is it that you make a pre-filter before you go into the algorithm and input the data or is it that you make a risk assessment and then define what elements are you going to incorporate here? How do you actually make it into action? It's a great question too because I think little do people know that before we even move into the modeling itself there is like a lot of prior conversations that need to happen and I was mentioning before about the clarity on knowing like what do I want to source? Do I want to source all? What's my strategy? I think if at the beginning it's clear like let's say the company wants to do I don't know one day delivery because that's our dream. I think then the distribution network will follow and different distribution networks serve different purposes but I think as supply chain practitioners we do have the responsibility on connecting whatever we set up to serve the greater purpose and I think that's where we gain a lot of power because there is always conflicting priorities and there is the conflicting priority of like I want to deliver everything every single day to you every hour but that's not very sustainable unless we have a fleet that it's all electric and other considerations but there is a trade-off there like what's more important for you to follow the trend and then just deliver everything every single day or actually make a claim and say like you know we're responsible we are just gonna like optimize our routes and we will deliver when we can. So it's a lot of prioritization and prioritizable conflict but if the company has a clear strategy does get started out from the start but what I can tell you is that having a clear scorecard criteria on how we're gonna grade the different proposals and the different networks that we have was critical. So for example, security that's something that I didn't mention, right? But these phone devices are like high value you do need a lot of like the facilities need to be guarded like even the security practices that they have in the warehouse matter. So that was like a high priority because there was a lot of lost and deft and they were having a lot of cost inefficiencies there so that was a priority for them I know your priority was that insurance was like all the devices being moved was covering the price. So those things are clarified from the start before you even start defining anything otherwise what's gonna happen is well the number and the algorithm says something very nice and this is what we think a supply chain we should go and do but then it's very easy to get in the rabbit hole and like well but that's not my priority I don't want this. So having those conversations from the start help I'm setting that baseline so you can make faster decisions as you move into the modeling because the modeling will never tell you what you want them to hear, right? But at least you have data and you can say like we made this decision because this is our priority and this is how much money we're living on the table and that's clear. Awesome, thank you Annalisa. The, actually the empowerment I guess you'd say really the initial point of how it empowers us as supply chain professionals, you know and it's often we call them like the model and the output of the model and the algorithm and here's the answer, you know it's $5 or whatever it is, you know but there's so much goes into, you know the supply criteria and that balance scorecard that you mentioned but then also really also mentioned kind of establishing that work hash cycle and that strategy and to know what flows on before you even started modeling so I guess that's awesome to hear.  One thing I also wanted to add is every industry is different like to me there are distribution networks that are very hard to change, right? Like you already built a manufacturing facility and like moving the manufacturing facilities not as easy but I can tell you that in consumer goods for example like bottling water you could turn up and turn down facilities as you please. So that's something also to consider like the easiness to move your decision some decisions are like immensely critical you cannot just be moving manufacturing but there are others that depending on your industry you can be more flexible on them. Yeah, that's something to add. Yeah, that makes sense. That flexibility I think is what's something that some companies are maybe looking for in this dynamic environment right now for sure. Awesome. Before we transition to questions from the audience thank you for all of you who put questions there in that Q&A feature, speak into those and keep putting those in there and do please use that Q&A feature but maybe one last topic we wanted to discuss before we get to those questions is kind of the topic of data. You mentioned this when you were talking about the case study and how that data is critical inputs to the model also probably it's critical to some of those pre the strategy decisions and some of the before work that goes into the modeling but with supply chains we also know that data ecosystem is complex I guess you could say are fragmented or siloed as a comment term that we often hear sometimes that data see or it's just not connected maybe there's tons of data but it's just not connected and it's hard to kind of link up like that for the cash cycle, all those pieces together. Same thing with some of the sustainability criteria you know, CO2 emissions for that kind of thing. So I'm wondering if you can do some of the challenge and opportunities, maybe even barriers you just kind of on that data ecosystem from this process. Yeah, so I'm glad you mentioned this because I remember like learning the concept I'm like, yeah, this is great like we can optimize and blah, blah, blah getting the data is not that easy. I mean, the transportation and the warehouse cost was pretty straightforward if you will just because we weren't getting quotes and then we have to standardize them but for example, the forecast of the demand per channel, you would think like, oh, that's very straightforward which was asked for that information. Well, it was not that easy, right? Like it was like merging two companies like it was very complex task. Another thing that I found fascinating is inventory holding costs for some reason it becomes very controversial, right? Like convincing the leadership and making them realize, I mean, you need to bring finance on your side always but making them realize like there is a cost associated for us holding this like there is a capital cost, right? Like there is a trade-off of me having that inventory sitting and diversifying five different warehouses instead of one. It's a very difficult thing to explain, believe me. Like I think the whole concept that we probably have a risk pooling and like when you have more concentration you can aggregate errors. It's a concept that not necessarily everyone has. There is also the fact that I might have the priority of being sustainable and having causes my top priority and that's why big conversations need to happen but sales might have the priority of like fulfilling orders as fast as they can, right? Even for a retail channel and having five warehouses will meet what they want, right? But it's just having clarity about their different teams and why a decision is being made but I can tell you that the data is not the easiest task to get. Like there is a lot of cleanup and agreement on like this is the forecast that I'm gonna be using because if you increase the demand in certain lines then your cost will look attractive at some point but the reality is that not for everything that forecast is accurate. So there is a lot of critical thinking that it's necessary from our side on knowing the business and also like getting grain and not just like plugging numbers and saying like this is what the model says it's more than that, yeah. Thank you, Annalise. And I like how it always comes together to communication and the importance that it has that everyone can speak the language of the others stakeholder the fact that we need to convince someone in finance we need to understand what the finance person needs. We need to talk with people in manufacturing we need to understand human resources needs because it's important to know as you say can we just close down this factory and then open it up? Not only from the manufacturing perspective but from the union perspective or the impact on the society. So I loved how you brought it all together to communication and not being silos as Kellen was talking about. And I want to close us with one last question and this is because we know your credential holder and an MIT alumna. And even though we have people from like this is a very broad audience they have different level of experiences joining us here today. But we want to know what is your recommendation or your advice for those that are just shaping their supply chain field. Someone probably has been in another field for a long time and then they want to switch to supply chain or someone probably is just starting a supply chain and want to know what's next and we love your career and we would love to know what is your recommendation for them? Yeah, definitely. I think that supply chain is like a puzzle solving. So like if you love solving puzzles and also like using data it's very analytical, honestly. I've never been in a project that doesn't use data. Then you're in the right place but you need to be very comfortable like dealing with complexity and also with a lot of ambiguity. Ambiguity and also with not being light. I think supply chain historically has a seat in the table that is like you need to do what I tell you to do your Disneyland. So I think that mindset is evolving as we move and we became more on the hot seats in the last couple of years but it's just very, it's like a very fascinating career for me and a very fascinating topic just because you get to work with everyone in the company and like different departments and you need to learn to speak a language of others. And I guess it's the same for other departments and they might say the same about supply chain like I need to learn to talk to them but the reality is that within supply chain if you wanna make change happen is a lot of communication but a lot of data and also like knowing about the business and knowing about like this is what they want to achieve and put yourself on the shoes of like if I wanna make this company successful how I can contribute to that objective. So what I recommend always is if you're starting your data analytical skills right like that's fundamental like there is no going in supply chain without it especially in these times a lot of the decisions will rely on data and again, there is the soft skills and I'm sure that other careers will have those soft skills but I think in supply chain a good place to start is having those data analytics skills. Awesome, well, hopefully, you know, your energy is very empowering inside hopefully our audience out there is really feeling that it crosses a little bit, I think well, I appreciate your insights. So maybe we're gonna launch into our we're gonna pull some questions from the audience Q&A before we do that, we wanna launch our second poll so I think that's that second poll real quick here. Well, that comes up, the question was the most in part of today's and we always, you know in through our webinars as we've been in so, you know, some of the options you understand how to incorporate real life considerations in my models and maybe you found your data management supply chains was expanded by today's webinar just take a quick minute and chill out well that all in some this year from the Q&A and so I'm gonna kind of maybe buy in a couple this really builds on what you just in there what Laura was mentioning with communicating aligning stakeholders, that part of it. So there's a couple of questions here one from Rich and one also from like Michael and I guess the question that all or the way I collapse these two together is the concept of change management and aligning stakeholders and what happens if there is an alignment, you know what happens if the sales team is really pushing for a forecast and the, you know warehouse separation can't deliver on that forecast and how do we, how do you approach that misalignment and then how do you, you know work to some of those change management pieces to gain alignment, I guess. Yes, there is always political games right in companies but letting that aside I think what has been proven successful at least in my last year like couple of years in my career is the simpler you can explain something even if it sounds like, oh my God, I'm explaining a baby it's the best way you can go. I think also putting yourself in their shoes, right like it sometimes is hard like creating a lot of empathy for someone in sales who is really like trying to make your quota and that's how they're being paid and saying like, look, I understand that's your priority but like having someone mediating also helps too like a finance person, right like that person is taking care of the cost aspect of the company so that person will help you translate a lot of what you're saying but putting yourself on their shoes and trying your best to really say like, I understand that's your priority this is how I will be able to help and I can understand this is a con but this sounds to me more like an edge case or I think understanding the other side of the story help us to supply 10 practitioners I think historically we tended to be like oh, I just work here in isolation and this is why I just run this network and that's it again, to get by in you need to put yourself in the shoes of the other and understand their side of the story and like what really worries them and some people don't like being exposed, right like they don't like to be told like, I don't know what I'm talking about you can take them aside and say like let me explain you this like one to one and get you to the details and I mean, not everyone has the same and a legal background too so like regression model or like optimization model or like this is a black box I don't wanna do this so what is this black box?  So having like a little bit of empathy on that and then being clear on like, look this is how it works in a very simple matter matters I normally learned a lot and I developed this skill by listening a lot to earning calls from companies because in earning calls, they typically teach or like tell them about their strategy in a very simple manner sometimes a very, very, very complex model so just take a step at that it's just very interesting how communication could be simplified from our side because as soon as someone doesn't understand you and it's about them changing but not you it's not gonna work, so. Thank you Annalisa and definitely like empathy and knowing that not like we can all be experts but probably just in different fields and that we need to be able to explain our knowledge in different levels depending on the stakeholders we have in the other side so that's a perfect advice and I love that we're touching a lot of soft skills because we usually move on like more into the technical side so I love this, thank you for bringing that audience I have another question, this is from Joseph and this is not fully related but it's on technology and supply chain and they are very interested in knowing about your experience they are asking if you have seen a widespread implementation of digital twins in the supply chain in any of the projects you've worked for? Yes, definitely it's very difficult because normally in technology we'll see it like I've seen and I can share it after the call and I can share the white paper it always needs to have a purpose and I have actually seen it in telecommunications because there is a lot of reliability that you need in the cell site towers specifically in the network towers that you need to have so having a digital twin on what's actually built on the site helps so I've seen it I can tell you that digital twins is not for everything like it's not like digital twins let's just go do it for everything like it's not like that I think again when it's like very capital intensive I think it makes sense because then you really wanna know what's installed because if you need to maintain it then you need to bring a crew if you have a digital twin that typically will help you so or simulate like what happens if I change how I position the different towers what's gonna be the megahertz that I'm gonna have so it has just cases I think one as a supply chain practitioner needs to be careful about it and really think what purpose is this serving and what is it contributing for the company again capital intensive companies I do think they have a use case for sure yeah and I'm happy to share what I think it's public so I'm happy to share more about it I think I know companies and a lot of owners are into technology and it seems to be kind of one of those almost buzzword a little bit but also kind of one of those areas where there's a lot of attention being focused on right now so that's a great practical experience and I also loved your tip about earnings calls that's a great tip it's a critical message that a company has to put out there it can have such a big impact on their finances and a lot of other things and so they have to be clear and so precise with their language and so to learn from that great tip hopefully I'm definitely gonna do that for all of them so awesome so let's take a quick look at our results for our poll here the question was what's your priority session for you it looks like the majority here enjoy learning or understanding how to make real-life considerations so my network design was like that was kind of the core message today here so that's me I don't know if you have any answer or a thumb up over it that's cool I'm glad people are learning how to use all of these real constraints again modeling does help like it's not like something I've never seen it like it does help it gets you half there but it's not everything and again part of also our work is making that model credible but also do not overcomplicate it especially because a network is such an essential piece of the company you really want people to understand it yeah it's not something that you're doing an algorithm for allocating inventory and only us take care of it it's everyone will be impacted by your decision so do not over engineer it awesome yeah that makes a little sense awesome so I'm going to pull one question in here from the Q&A from Gulam Argoosh this kind of really builds on some of the comments earlier about the challenge of the data but then also your point about operating sustainability and how it's becoming more important we're increasingly the focus of a lot of companies is incorporating its capability criteria whether it's emissions or whether it's the social sustainability criteria into these models or into the process and some of those strategies before you even get to like an optimization model and I'm wondering we obviously data with you know things you mentioned you know inventory holding cost was a challenge from a data perspective what about sustainability side like is data a challenge or emissions accounting you know actually any basic emissions sometimes can be you know somewhat straightforward but also you know like where do you get data from some of those calculations and especially you know some of the other considerations that sustainably not just emissions yeah so I will talk about two different examples the reality is that calculating emissions is very challenging like really like we really wanted to know exactly how many emissions this cub has is extremely complex I know there are models and there are formulas to estimate but it's known that those estimates have a very large amount of error it's a baseline and those models can help you and there is even systems now that can help you calculate the emissions of your organization like there is information like okay this flight will be X and you can parade it and do your best and have a very broad estimate but again it is never going to be like super precise not now I mean it will I remember having a class in MIT and we were literally trying to trace like what was the emissions of this banana like it's almost impossible but again you can make your estimate and there are partners out there are going to help you on providing the data and that could be one avenue the second avenue that I've seen more from the optimization perspective is and this one I actually saw it with Josue who was in in the prior session with fuel like gas fuel cars there is a whole and there is a white paper on this as well that depending on the weight of the car and then how elevated the topography is it's the emissions that you will have based on the burnout of the gasoline right so the whole optimization of the route was based on the optimization of emissions and again this is like a gas fuel type of car I can tell you that there is a lot of research that is taking into account this consideration and it's actually being implemented I actually do think they have a company that implemented a lot of this modeling and that I can tell you that it's back based because they do control like this is the stops that we're going to have this is the topography that we are going to have and we perhaps need to first download everything that is heavier so when we go into you know slope we are a little bit lighter so you born less fuel so it's more to optimize the fuel consumption as you go on in in effect or as a result you will have less emissions so I've seen it on that avenue I can tell you that the one is more precise I do think it's more applicable but yeah there is the other avenue where you could estimate and do your best and it's the best wish for everyone but that the one that I talk about that route optimization it's the one that it's more clear to me and I've seen it implemented so Thank you Anneli for sharing those different avenues because of course it will also depends on the size of the company and the possibilities and the resources they have access to different industries also manage different levels of access to information or data systems or even different regulations will require different things from them so it's really important that you mention like this there are different possibilities it will depend on each case which one will be the best fit for you or your company so in the interest of time I think we can start wrapping this event up we truly appreciate all your insightful comments like we've learned a lot not only about a network design itself or the high-tech industry but also like the challenges you will face like when you're trying to implement something there will be complexity there will be resistance there will be a lot of features and factors that you usually don't have in your mind when you're just working with algorithms so we love to hear those from you I don't know if you have any final words for our audience Nope, I mean you guys are in the right spot the next decade again a lot of these concepts are evolving and I think the fascinating part of to me is like we're being part of that change and you know like think about okay now I need to have electrical vehicles so this car needs to be downtown these amounts of like there are new things coming our way that no one has thought before and it's just exciting honestly like I'm just excited for what's coming so go for it if you want to be in supply chain just do a lot of analytical work that's gonna take your places for sure yep thank you thank you for sharing your passion in supply chain for sure and I'm killing any final words yeah no for sure I just appreciate your time sharing your knowledge your time and your experiences today and definitely your energy your digital environment here your energy definitely across those digital wires very well so I appreciate you sharing your time on Elise sure awesome and anyone in our audience remember this is the second webinar of a three webinar series so we hope to see you in the last one which will be around mid-march so stay tuned and reach out to us if you have any questions see you in the next one thank you Annalise thank you Ghislaine thank you everyone for joining us thank you everyone


Hello and welcome to the session. In exercise 1-8, find the equation of the line which satisfy the given conditions. 8th one is perpendicular distance from the origin is 5 units and the angle made by the perpendicular with the positive x axis is 30 degrees. First, let us learn the equation of the line normal distance p on the origin angle omega which the normal makes with the positive direction of x axis is given by cos omega plus y sin omega is equal to p. So, with the help of this idea we are going to solve the above problem. So, this is our key idea. Let us now start with the solution and here we are given at the perpendicular distance from the origin is 5 units. So, this implies p which is the normal distance is equal to 5 units and angle made by the perpendicular with the positive x axis is 30 degrees. So, omega is equal to 30 degrees. So, by a key idea equation of line is given by 30 degrees plus y sin 30 degrees is equal to p that is 5 or we have x cos 30 degrees is root 3 upon 2 plus y sin 30 degrees is half is equal to 5 or we have root 3 into x plus y is equal to 10. Thus equation of a line which satisfies the given condition is given by root 3 into x plus y is equal to 10. So, this is our answer. Hope you have understood it. Take care and have a good day.


Welcome to another edition of RCE. Again, this is Brock Palin. You can find us online, subscribe to the podcast RSS feed and all that other fun stuff at RCE-cast.com. Also, if you could leave us a review on iTunes, that definitely helps for getting the word out for the people who may be interested in the kind of material that we offer. Also, iTunes almost shows a certain number of back episodes. The entire back catalog is available at the website. So again, that's RCE-cast.com. Today I'm flying solo actually, so going to roll right into our guest. Today we're going to be talking about Elmer, which is a suite of scientific tools. And so I have with us three developers of Elmer. So guys, why don't you go ahead and state your name and give us a little bit of background. Okay. Hello, my name is Peter Roback. I'm developing Elmer since 2001. I'm a physicist in background and let's say my special interest lies in solution or multi-physical problems. And there I have made most of the contributions. Hello to my name is Thomas Zwinger. My background is physics and mechanical engineering. I work here at CSC as a senior application scientist. And I mainly do applications of Elmer either in microfluidics or in geophysical problems, mainly in ice sheet, glacier flows and micro meteorology. Hello, my name is Mikko Bückling. I'm an application specialist here at CSC. I've been working with Elmer for a couple of years now. My background is from computer science and from mathematics. And so like my specialty is numerics and HPC in general. So I'm like a helper for the physicists here. So real quick before we go into Elmer, where and what exactly is CSC for people who don't know? Well, CSC is sort of the national supercomputing center in Finland and we have lots of other activities as well. But from maybe your audience, this is the main activity and then Elmer software is then a natural companion to this supercomputing activity. Okay, so can you give us a little bit of overview? What exactly would you say Elmer is? Well, I would say that Elmer is a multi-physical finite element software suite. It comprises of several parts. So we have solver, we have the GUI and even a post processor. And it's both for end users, but you can also use it as a library if you are developing your own models. So how exactly, give us a history. How did you guys get started on this path of making this package? Also, there's a number of other solvers out there. Why did Elmer get started? Elmer actually got started in 1995 as part of a Finnish national program in computational fluid dynamics and at that time there wasn't really open source tools available. So it's certainly not a special purpose nationally, but later then we went to open source. So maybe my colleagues can contribute. Well, I step in. So the open source that was done in 2005 where it was released under the new public license too. So officially the release was a new public license too or later. In 2012, if I recall correctly, we made a small adjustment to that in that sense that the Elmer solver library, so that the solver suit itself was published under the LGPL such that commercial codes or applications could plug into it. One major step in between I think we should mention was that in 2008 we added the Elmer GUI. So the graphical user interface which is based on Qt library to the package was a step taken in order to make it more popular, more easier to use for beginners so to increase the learning effect with Elmer. And from my point of view personally, I want to add 2012 where we officially established the Elmer ICE package, which is an add-on package for a huge scientific community of Elmer, the glaseologically-induced inclined community, which deals with the simulation of ice sheets and glaciers, which is very important for climate research nowadays. So you mentioned there's a library in the GUI. Do you have your own language in the GUI or how exactly does one kind of program the GUI? Well, the GUI is quite lean so it's maybe 20,000 lines of C++ and it's programmable in the way that you can define the menus using XML files, but Elmer doesn't really try to be something like free friend++ or any code where you could sort of write down your own equations, so you have to sort of still do a little bit of programming if you want your own equations put in. Okay, and then Elmer itself, what's the primary language that probably the primary library and solvers written in? Well, most of the packages or the internals are written in Portran 90 or later and then with some added C parts due to some legacy code, mainly and mostly because at the time that the software was written you couldn't really load shared objects with Portran, so there are some C layers there for doing these things and this was for the solver part and for the GUI part that's just C++ mostly. Okay, so if I'm developing an application and I want to use a routine from the Elmer library, am I restricted kind in the languages I can call it as or are there bindings for things like Python or other higher level languages or alternative languages to Fortran? Well, currently we don't have an API for calling the routines from anywhere else than Fortran but this could be quite easily actually added. We are actually now doing the ISOC bindings for generally just cleaning up the code and using ISOC bindings there so you could actually quite easily add ISOC bindings for external calls from C or from Python. If I may add to that, so there is an internally developed language if you want to say so, it's called MATC which enables in the solver input files in those files to define the runs to program simple mathematical context there. Not much difficult things. If things get a little bit more difficult, we recommend that you start writing a Fortran routine which very easily can be dynamically linked to the system. Okay, so in terms of the actual programming model, is this code parallel capable? Is it serial only? Is it MPI capable? What's kind of the focus of the type of solvers it has? Well, I could say that mostly the parallelism comes from MPI so it's a distributed memory code in that sense. Lately a lot of threading features have been added with open MP to the code but that's still in development so it's mostly MPI. Are those threaded features meant to do like hybrid mode using threads on multicore processors and also combining it with MPI or is it currently kind of one or the other? Well, our target is hybrid. So something that probably slides in here, is there any work to enable the use of accelerators, you know, GP GPUs, open CL, Xeon Phi, anything like that with Elmer? Currently Elmer cannot really use any GP GPUs or accelerators but as for Xeon Phi's we have actually ongoing work with this and actually CSC just recently, this was made official a week ago, we joined the Intel Parallel Computing Center program. So within this program our target is to optimize Elmer for Xeons and enable usage on Xeon Phi's. So a lot of work will be done in regards to this particular point. Okay, so let's shift gears a little bit and let's talk about the type of science that Elmer actually focuses to solve. You mentioned a couple, can you give us a couple more examples of how Elmer's being used and the types of problems that the library aims to solve? Yes, Elmer is suitable in solving all kind of partial differential equations but of course most of them come from the field of computational engineering. So we have fluid mechanics, we have solid mechanics and computational electromagnetics and heat transfer. So these are the main fields. But there is even some quantum mechanics and more let's say seldomly used fields. So how hard is it to extend Elmer though? Does it have some sort of plug-in architecture or something like that? Say it does a lot of what I want to do but my background is nuclear engineering and if I want to add more quantum type behavior to Elmer, how would you want to go about doing that? Well if your problem can be described by a partial differential equation then it's quite simple. So there are existing examples how to write your own PDE and let's say a generic advection diffusion reaction equation would be maybe 100 lines of code. So you can start from that and write your own equation and hopefully get a tailored solution. If your problem is not a partial differential equation then it could of course be much bigger job but let's say standard problems are quite easy but of course difficult problems tend to be always difficult. So what packages that people might be more familiar with or run across that Elmer would maybe compare to as an alternative to be explored? There's other PDE libraries out there, there's Petsuit, Rolinos and a number of others. There's commercial applications like Comsol and others. How would you say Elmer fits among these in the landscape? Would you say they're complementary, competitors? Solve similar types of problems with a simpler higher level language for certain types of science? What's kind of the focus? Okay so if I compare to other financial libraries like D2 or LeapMesh++ then I would say that those are more oriented for developers. So Elmer is also an end user program and on the other hand Elmer is written in 490 and newer let's say dialects. So they have a little bit different target audience as developers go because people tend to prefer either of the languages. Then if one looks at competition among software then I would say that for instance the instance open form is complementary in the way that Elmer is not that much used in high Reynolds number flows but Elmer then takes let's say the lower regime of the Reynolds number more easily. And if we compare to Comsol, more to this extent of course their Comsol is much nicer to use but we have some advantage for instance in the parallel computing so I don't maybe want to see the commercial software as direct competitors. It's sort of you either choose the open source or the commercial sort of route and then you choose your tools according to that. Okay so Elmer has a high level language and also lets programmers think in a little bit higher level constructs in some of these other libraries but Elmer itself does provide a library. So what are some packages out there that can use Elmer under the covers for doing solving or you know optionally use Elmer? I don't think there are other programs at least not that well known ones that use Elmer. So it's the other way around that we tend to use many of the libraries under linear algebra but Elmer maybe is primarily it's an end user. Let's say software that is easily extendable with new equations. It's maybe not ideally a library that you would plug in under your hoods you know let's say other software so we have a little bit different profile than some libraries. Okay you mentioned that Elmer uses some libraries itself what are some of the things that Elmer leverages to you know provide performance ease of use coder use things like that. Could you explain in more detail I mean what are you particularly interested to? I more want to know what tools or well I don't want to get a tool so much quite yet but I want to know what software you guys leverage so you don't have to write as much. I got the point yeah sorry. Yeah so basically external libraries we plug into a lot of them. So the most prominent and actually essential so we cannot run the code without it. The LAPAC BLAS and UMPAC and we ship them actually with the source code. In order to make sure that if you combine it from scratch that it's included. And if we go to the parallel computing side on an optional basis you can include a hyper mumps mumps is a very versatile parallel direct solver Trilinos SuperLU and Bardiso whereas Bardiso is more for the multi-threading. In special applications like the the ice the classical applications we also have some solvers within the interfaces to net CDF which is the common standard of input output for climate related problems. And if we turn to the post processors there is a legacy post processor which is called Elmer post which is not further developed from our side but that one relies on TCLTK. So quite old stuff and the newer post processor that is included embedded in the Elmer Graphically User Interface Elmer GUI is based on VTK and the QWT. So this is basically the whole range of external libraries we link into. Of course I have to mention also QT or QT itself which the Elmer GUI relies on. If I may add to the post processing so we consider nowadays ParaFU as the good tool for doing the post processing. So basically giving this away out of our hands ParaFU is a very versatile open source tool which reads in the VTK output which Elmer is capable of writing. Oh okay so you've moved to using kind of like the standard VTK file formats and so anything that can handle VTK files ParaFU visit others would be able to be used as a post processor with Elmer? Yes I maybe should emphasize that we used the XML based newer version of the VTK format so and it's used in binary so it's rather compact compared to the let's say previous ASCII version of the VTK format that we had a few years ago. Okay so you have a GUI but you also have an MPI and you work in HPC center. I assume you can run the Elmer solver without the GUI so it supports batch environments just fine? Yes. Okay so what do you see a scientist's normal workflow who's using Elmer would be like from beginning to end what would be the like those of you who are the physicists on the call how do you use this to solve real science? Yeah maybe a tramping so I have a lot of experience a lot of experience within these glaciological applications in the ice sheet places so what we usually do is mashing with open source software like GMSH very good software for getting measures unstructured measures some colleagues from France then used also a program which is called YAMS for the redistributing adaptation of these measures it takes in input from for instance satellite surface velocity data of ice sheets in order to identify the areas where by higher shear rates it would need higher measure resolution and then we do a lot of mashing actually we go from food grains to 3D within Elmer so there is a capability of a parallel mashing of already partitioned measures so we base Elmer is based on the domain of the composition so each separate process is running on a separate domain so if you can avoid partitioning in 3D which we do then you can have a real advantage to avoid that bottleneck in parallel computing and that's what we do basically vertically extrude our measures if it's possible already on the amount of process of course we are using so that's on the pre-processing side and on the post-processing side basically we already explained you can power a few which you can use power a few which also can be used in parallel mode if you want to if you have larger systems to post-process and Elmer itself of course it's completely running in parallel so that's basically workflow so you start building a geometry and also the mashing with open source like GMSH eventually refine it with another program read it into Elmer and post-process with power a few. Does Elmer have any type of capability to do say AMR adaptive mashing such that say you have crack propagation or something like that and you want to refine around that region can it do that and if so how does it handle load balancing? Well unfortunately we can do adaptivity but we cannot handle load balancing so adaptivity was developed in Elmer more let's say about 10 years ago and we sort of got stuck into the load balancing so we didn't have the resources to continue the development of the let's say parallel adaptivity approach so I must say that in that respect Elmer is not let's say among the most spectacular software so our adaptivity is purely serial at the moment. Okay and then in terms of mesh formats he mentioned GMSH which I'm going to have to track down myself but what kind of I assume Elmer as a library has the ability to read different common mesh formats what do you say some of the most common ones are? Well as said GMSH has its own mesh format we support also the universal mesh format for instance which is written by Salome package and then we try to support also mesh format so certain commercial packages but there we often see that the commercial mesh formats they are not easy to find specifications on the format so we have to often guess a little bit how the format is built so for instance we can read in meshes from console multi physics from some older version of Gambit and so on but sometimes meshing getting the meshes out of commercial course may be quite frustrating. So in terms of community involvement though so say I wanted to add a mesh format or something like that do you see a lot of that do you see a lot of community contribution to Elmer or is there kind of like a core group with maybe around the edges? I would say more of the latter so we maybe code ourselves 90% of the features but that was a good example the let's say different mesh formats they have had some contributions so for instance yesterday I got in a patch that implemented some new elements to the console multi physics mesh reader so yes we do get some contributions but of course not as much as we would like to get and we are very happy to get those so we are agile and try to let's say get all the contributions that we get we try to also incorporate them into the official version. So what's the community actually look like is there a mailing list forum how basically how can people get involved with this? Yes there is a discussion forum it has more than 1000 members and there is some active discussions it could be even more active but but you can find pretty much on every topic some discussions if you look at the search features so we also have a wiki where actually if people ask for being switched free can actively contribute also for the classical community especially which I already mentioned is the largest scientific community using Elmer we have a special portal which is called ElmerEyes portal where they can have tips and contacts and also news related to this very specific scientific field and also on that side for that community we are running a mailing list so where we can broadcast new developments meetings etc. I could also add that we have a group in LinkedIn which includes maybe 250 members currently so we try to be active in many different fields so. Okay so channeling Jeff here since he couldn't be here today what you already mentioned that Elmer's license under GPL v2 so what code revision system do you use and why? Well currently what is in use is SVN from Sourceforge that's mainly I think that's mainly for historical reasons Sourceforge was just picked up as a possible place to put the code we are now considering moving to using JIT but that's just thought currently so it's not set in stone if we will make it a switch or not. Okay so how far can Elmer scale like what's the largest problem either in elements or CPUs ran that's been solved with Elmer? Well the finite element assembly it scales always ideally so that is not the bottleneck but the bottleneck is in solving the linear systems that result from the finite element assembly and the type of equation well then dictates quite a lot how well we can scale we have demonstrated scalability for instance up to 6000 cores using FETI which is the finite element tier and interconnects method. Quite suitable for elasticity problems for instance but I would say that we can scale up to thousands in many fields but you have to have a big problem if you want to run in thousands of cores so maybe at least 10,000 or 50,000 degrees of freedom for each core so if you want to run with 5000 cores you better have a problem which has some hundreds of millions unknowns in it. Okay so what future features are coming to Elmer? Yes so currently we are working quite actively in computational electromagnetics so we recently implemented a new type of element an edge element that can also be distorted so it can be well you can provide on but maybe I give this to you. Well I think that what Peter is trying to say that mathematically the mapping doesn't have to be up fine from the reference element to the actual element so that's what you're trying to say. Yes and this opens let's say new fields in computational electromagnetics because this element is quite rare I don't think there are many open source tools that has this feature for example. Also recently we have added features for gluing let's say boundary conditions even if they are non-conforming they may be rotating and also I think one important feature that we are hoping to see in the near future is new features in the multi-threading so maybe Nico can say more. Yeah I mean I think that I mentioned this before but we are really looking into hybridizing the code and exploiting Xeon files for instance so like as either as native code processors or as offload devices or some key parts of the code. And actually related to this this development due to difficulties in cross compiling with the old build system we are making a switch from the old order make based build system to to see make and this will happen in the near future. Yeah from the geophysical application side there the tracing of some quantities within the systems for instance pollution in glaciers or flows general or also the estimation of age of ice layers for instance. So these are purely convective type of equations very nasty to solve actually with the collerquing method or impossible parking. We have a discontinuous collerquing solar which is already implemented but I would say it's still on a beta level. But some person from British Antarctic Survey contributed with a semi Lagrangian solar which I hope sooner or later will make it in the distribution. And that would be very nice tool for those kind of applications. Okay guys well thank you very much for your time what are the coordinates for finding Elmer downloading the code and generally just what's the website. Well you can find it under the CSC home pages so that would be www.csc.fi slash Elmer. Or if you want to come to the what I would call a general home base of Elmer it would be just Elmerfem.org where you find basically all the links to the relevant pages around Elmer. Including the special scientific community applications. Okay so Elmerfem.org. Elmerfem.org affirmative. Okay guys well thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to the session. I am Deepika here. Let's discuss a question. Prove that the function f given by fx is equal to log sin x is strictly increasing on an open interval 0 to pi by 2 and strictly decreasing on an open interval pi by 2 to pi. So, let's start the solution. We know that a function is strictly increasing on an open interval where its derivative is positive and a function is strictly decreasing on an open interval where its derivative is negative. So, we have fx is equal to log sin x therefore f dash x is equal to 1 over sin x into cos x and this is equal to cot x. Now for less than pi by 2 cot x is positive therefore f dash x is positive for 2 less than x less than pi cot x is negative therefore f dash x is negative hence decreasing an open interval 0 to pi by 2 and strictly decreasing on an open interval pi by 2 to pi hence proved. I hope the solution is clear to you. Bye and check you.


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