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Ashwin Gerard Colaco (UCI): Bringing Simulators Inside the Database: A Vision for Interactive Scientific Exploration
February 20 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Time & Location:
Friday Feb 20, 2026, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Donald Bren Hall 3011, ICS, UC Irvine
Donald Bren Hall 3011, ICS, UC Irvine
Lunch will be provided.
Title:
Bringing Simulators Inside the Database: A Vision for Interactive Scientific Exploration
Abstract:
Physics-based simulators are essential for scientific discovery and risk assessment, powering what-if analyses for events like wildfires and hurricanes. Yet today’s workflow is fundamentally disconnected: analysts manually run simulations, export results, and load them into a database before any analysis can begin. This linear pipeline is slow, brittle, and especially limiting when the analysis itself reveals the need for new or refined simulation data.
Physics-based simulators are essential for scientific discovery and risk assessment, powering what-if analyses for events like wildfires and hurricanes. Yet today’s workflow is fundamentally disconnected: analysts manually run simulations, export results, and load them into a database before any analysis can begin. This linear pipeline is slow, brittle, and especially limiting when the analysis itself reveals the need for new or refined simulation data.
In this talk, I present a vision for GenIE, a new database paradigm that makes the database simulation-aware by seamlessly integrating multiple simulators as first-class components. Designed as an extension to PostgreSQL, GenIE dynamically invokes simulators based on the user’s query, avoids generating irrelevant data, reuses prior results, and supports iterative refinement at interactive speeds. I illustrate GenIE’s potential through two use cases: wildfire smoke dispersion analysis using WRF-SFIRE and HYSPLIT, and hurricane hazard assessment combining wind, surge, and flood models. Our preliminary results show how GenIE can transform these traditionally slow, static analyses into responsive explorations by intelligently managing the trade-off between simulation accuracy and runtime. I conclude by outlining the data engineering challenges and future research directions in realizing the full potential of simulation-aware databases for next-generation scientific data management.
Bio:
Ashwin Gerard Colaco is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at UC Irvine, advised by Sharad Mehrotra. His research focuses on the intersection of database systems and machine learning, with a focus on cost-efficient inference and simulation-driven data exploration. He’s supported by the Hasso Plattner Institute Fellowship for scalable databases for ML research.