// 01 — About
From turbulence theory to production solvers.
I'm an aerospace engineer and software developer. I earned my undergraduate degree in Aerospace Engineering at IIT Madras, then a Ph.D. at Cornell University in the Turbulence & Combustion Group, completed in December 2012.
For nearly a decade at Siemens I helped build the flow and combustion physics inside STAR-CCM+. Today, as a Principal Software Engineer at GE Aerospace, I lead the design and development of a high-order LES/CFD solver for hybrid CPU/GPU architectures — writing the code that simulates combustion inside jet engines.
// 02 — Trajectory
Experience
Leading the design and development of a high-order CFD solver for hybrid CPU/GPU architectures, to simulate and design GE engine components. Promoted to Principal Software Engineer in 2026 (previously Senior Staff Software Engineer).
Developed the CFD software Simcenter STAR-CCM+ (C++/Java) — combustion models on the reacting-flow team, plus porting the solver to hybrid CPU/GPU computing.
Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering (Turbulence & Combustion Group) — computationally-efficient, scalable dimension-reduction & tabulation algorithms for turbulent combustion, tested on up to 9,000 cores.
// 03 — Toolkit
An applied scientific-computing stack.
I turn numerical methods and physics into production-grade scientific software — accurate, fast, and built to scale across HPC clusters and hybrid CPU/GPU systems.
// 04 — Research
Making combustion chemistry fast enough to be useful.
My work develops accurate and computationally efficient models and algorithms for simulating combustion. The methods were validated against experiment, delivered large speedups over existing approaches, and scaled across thousands of compute cores — now freely available and finding their way into commercial engine-design tools.
// 05 — Open Source
Code in the open.
Debian GNU/Linux
Official Debian Developer maintaining and contributing to packages in the Debian project for nearly two decades.
View maintained packages →ISAT-RCCE-GALI
Combustion chemistry acceleration tools from my doctoral work, released freely for public and commercial use.
Cornell TCG release →New languages & tools
Exploring new programming languages and contributing to open-source projects in my spare time.
github.com/varunhiremath →// 06 — Off the clock
Interests & hobbies
Pickleball
Competitive play is my current obsession — fast games, good people.
Gym & fitness
Recently all-in on training and staying strong and active.
Travel & nature
Exploring new places and getting out into the outdoors whenever I can.
Open source
Debian Developer since 2006, tinkering with new languages for fun.
// 07 — Contact
Let's talk shop.
Questions about CFD, combustion, HPC, or a pickleball game — feel free to reach out.