Hui Liu works at the University of Calgary, Canada, as a research associate. He holds a PhD degree in Computational Mathematics and Parallel Computing from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2010), and a BSc degree in Computational Mathematics from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC, 2005).

In 2005, after fulfilling his bachelor’s degree in computational mathematics, he was accepted for a PhD scholarship at the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he studied computational mathematics and parallel computing. During his PhD program, he studied adaptive finite element methods (h-, p-, hp-adaptive methods), parallel computing, dynamic load balancing, encoding and decoding of Hilbert space-filling curves, and algorithm design. He developed encoding and decoding algorithms for arbitrary Hilbert space-filling curves.

In 2010, he joined the Reservoir Simulation Group, University of Calgary, and worked on GPU computing. It is well known that linear solvers occupy most simulation time during black oil simulations, and if linear solvers are accelerated, reservoir simulations can be sped up. He worked on the acceleration of linear solvers and preconditioners using GPUs, including Krylov subspace solvers, algebraic multigrid solvers, and various preconditioners. He implemented two linear solver packages: one for a single GPU and another for multi-GPUs.

In 2013, he started a parallel platform project to support the development of large-scale reservoir simulations. The platform is designed for distributed-memory parallel systems and uses MPI for communications. It provides gridding, load balancing, mapping, parallel linear solvers, preconditioners, well modeling, visualization, keyword parsing, and parallel input and output. The platform has been utilized for black oil models, compositional models, and thermal models. New parallel preconditioners specialized for reservoir simulation have been developed. The platform and parallel reservoir simulators are scalable, and large-scale reservoir models with billions of grid cells can be simulated.

His research interests include numerical methods for partial differential equations, reservoir simulation, linear/nonlinear solvers, algebraic multigrid solvers, preconditioners, parallel computing, and GPU computing. He has had several papers published in the Journal of Computational Mathematics, Journal of Computational Physics, Numerical Linear Algebra with Applications, and Computers & Mathematics with Applications.