Ilaksh Adlakha Department of Applied Mechanics Areas of interest: Plasticity, Environmental Degradation of Alloys, and Mechanical Behavior of Alloys

Ilaksh Adlakha is an Assistant Professor in the Applied Mechanics department at IIT Madras. He completed PhD (Mechanical) from Arizona State University (2015) and continued as post-doctoral fellow at the same institute before joining IITM in 2017. He received BTech (Mechanical) from Pune University (2008). Subsequently, he worked at MoserBaer Photovoltaic (Noida, UP) for two years.

How does your group keep the HPCE cluster busy?

My research interest lies at the interface of solid mechanics and materials science with a focus on development of structure-property relationships. We are currently working on the development of a predictive framework for environmentally assisted mechanical degradation of metallic alloys that synergistically combines electrochemical and mechanical insights from experiments and computation, accelerating alloy development by fine tuning mechanical deformation and uncertainty propagation of mechanical behavior of crystalline alloys. This requires utilization of various computational expensive techniques, such as ab-initio calculations, molecular dynamics, and finite element method. This provides essential insights to develop a comprehensive multiscale framework to tackle research problems.

How was your PhD and PostDoc experience with the computing facilities?

During my PhD and postdoc, I relied on extensive utilization of our in-house cluster and several large-scale supercomputing facilities present at the university and national level (Agave and XSEDE). For instance, some of the larger ab-initio calculations required few hundred CPU cores and took weeks to complete. Based on facing daunting queues and countless failed jobs, I learnt an important lesson that we should stay abreast with the developments in HPC, while being aware of the available resources to maximize the performance of our research codes. Nonetheless, I was fortunate to have access to several computational resources that allowed me to finish my PhD. I feel that the installation of Aqua, the HPC facilities at IITM provide a platform for cutting computational research.

What do you suggest to fellow PostDocs who wish to join academia in your field?

It is essential to understand various available experimental/computational tools to tackle a research problem and being able to collaborate with experts that can result in significant scientific contributions. Additionally, certain research problems are multidisciplinary, thus requiring a broad knowledge base that can be acquired either through interactions with colleagues or self-learning. Finally, understanding the limitations of any scientific computational tools can go a long way in improving the quality of research.