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Team for Advanced Flow Simulation and Modeling |
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AHPCRC Bulletin: Winter/Spring 1997 - Volume 7 Number 1-2AHPCRC NEWS BRIEFSAnita Anderson (AHPCRC-UM)Field Trips to AHPCRC by Area High School Students and College Computer ClubAs part of the AHPCRC's continuing efforts to expose high school students to the fields of scientific computer modeling and high performance computing, the Center hosted over forty Bloomington-Jefferson High School students from grades 9 through 12 in mid-May. The program included a briefing by Tayfun Tezduyar on the Center's mission and goals, followed by a description of current research projects and their application to Army-relevant problems as well as their application to every day problems. The students also received a tour of the computational and graphics and visualization facilities, and a hands-on demonstration in the Center's training classroom. The tour of the AHPCRC Graphics and Visualization Lab was given by Steve Demlow (AHPCRC-Network Computing Services, Inc.), a graphics and visualization specialist. Several visualization software packages developed at the Center were demonstrated, including a volume renderer showing CAT scan data of a human torso, and a 3D modeler showing a cargo aircraft. The process of transferring scientific animations from computers to videotape was described. The students were also shown the AHPCRC machine rooms. To initiate the class time, students were introduced to some simple concepts of fluid dynamics. Following this short introduction, students performed computational fluid dynamics experiments using our simplified student-interface. Students worked individually to model air flow over a wing, using a simple 2D computer model. Several properties were investigated, including air pressure, velocity and the formation of vortices at various angles of attack. Additionally, students made observations from two running simulations of water flow around bridge pylons under various flow conditions. The bridge simulations were being performed remotely on high performance parallel computers and being visualized locally. This allowed us to introduce students to some of the complexities of networking and parallel computing.
The AHPCRC continues to seek out ways to introduce high school students and teachers as well as other interested groups, to the field of scientific computer modeling and high performance computing. Toward that effort, talks are currently under way with the Science Museum of Minnesota to identify areas of common interest that may provide further opportunities. AHPCRC Summer Institute Graduate Interns at CEWESEddie Mason III, a graduate of the AHPCRC 1996 Undergraduate Summer Institute on High Performance Computing, has accepted a summer internship at the Corps of Engineers, Waterways Experiment Station (CEWES) in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Mason, a mathematics major at Clark Atlanta University (CAU), member of the CAU Honors Program, and PRISM-D scholarship recipient, spent the month of June working on development of an interface to improve visualization of data produced by the Groundwater Modeling System (GMS). Mason and Kenric Wright, a Jackson State University AHPCRC 1996 Undergraduate Summer Institute participant, completed a joint summer institute project involving analysis of a site in central Minnesota. GMS was used to perform an analysis of the transport of nitrates from the nonpoint sources of nitrates to the locations of the potential users of the groundwater. The computer program GLEAMS was used to simulate the loading of the nitrates to the groundwater. The skills Mason learned from working on this project will aide him in this summer's internship at CEWES. 6th Conference on Current Trends in Computational ChemistryFor the second consecutive year, the AHPCRC will co-sponsor the Conference on Current Trends in Computational Chemistry. The symposium, organized by Jackson State University, will cover all areas of computational chemistry as well as quantum chemistry. The local host of the event is the Corps of Engineers, Waterways Experiment Station, located in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The program will include invited papers and contributed posters in areas covered. This year's symposium is being held on Friday and Saturday, November 7 and 8, in Vicksburg. For further information and registration please contact: Conference Chairman 1997 International Conference on Computational Engineering ScienceICES '97 was held in San Jose, Costa Rica in early May. Included in the group of researchers from around the world who participated at this conference were several from the AHPCRC who presented their AHPCRC work. Jeff Derby, the AHPCRC Advanced Materials Science Team Coordinator, chaired a session on Parallel Methods in Applied Computational Fluid Dynamics. During this session invited papers were given by Tayfun Tezduyar, the AHPCRC Simulation and Modeling Team Coordinator, on "3D Simulation of Free-Surface Flows with Parallel Finite Element Method" and by Andrew Johnson (AHPCRC-UM) on "Parallel Computing Methods for 3D Simulations of Fluid-Object Interactions." Tezduyar and Derby chaired a session on Parallel Methods in Applied Computational Fluid Dynamics. During this session, invited papers were given by Andrew Yeckel (AHPCRC-UM) on "Parallel Computation of 3D, Time-Dependent Hydrodynamics During Solution Crystal Growth" and by Valmor de Almeida (AHPCRC-UM) on "Experiments with a Robust Parallel Algorithm for Analysis of 3D Steady-State Flows of Incompressible Fluids."
The AHPCRC also participated in ICES '97 as an exhibitor, displaying graphics of research engaged in by the above teams as well as that of the Enabling Technologies and the Environmental Sciences teams. This work, as well as the many AHPCRC publications made available to conference attendees, demonstrate the importance of high performance computing in the solution of critical defense problems. AHPCRC Researchers are First to Use NetworkCS's New CRAY T3E-900Network Computing Services, Inc. (NetworkCS) installed a new CRAY T3E-900 on 18 June 1997. Through arrangements with NetworkCS, the AHPCRC was the first production user of this new NetworkCS system. The newly installed CRAY T3E has 256 application processing elements, each with a peak performance of 900 MegaFLOPS and 512 Megabytes of memory. System peak performance is rated at 230 application GigaFLOPS and total system memory is over 131 Gigabytes. The first production user job run on the system was a 3D computation of flow around a ram-air parafoil in steady glide. An unstructured mesh-based stabilized finite element method developed by the AHPCRC researchers was used in the computation. The mesh employed had over 27 million grid points. At every pseudo time-step of the computation, a coupled, nonlinear equation system with over 104 million unknowns had to be formed and solved using an iterative solution technique. The computation used 256 processors, with the sustained overall performance reaching, at this early stages of the performance optimization, over 33 GigaFLOPS.
Vinay Kalro (AHPCRC-UM), a Research Associate on the Team for Advanced Flow Simulation
and Modeling (T-AFSM) led by Tayfun Tezduyar (AHPCRC-UM), was responsible for the
computation. He is collaborating with the Natick Research, Development, and Engineering Center
and other members of the T-AFSM to develop new computational methods for modeling of large
ram-air parachutes and other airdrop systems. Additional information will appear in the upcoming
issues of the AHPCRC Bulletin.
Tezduyar Named Distinguished McKnight University Professor
The six 1997 Distinguished McKnight University Professors were nominated by their departments and selected by a committee of prominent faculty. The awards associated with the professorships are funded from a McKnight Foundation endowment in conjunction with the University's Permanent University Fund. At a ceremony in June, Tezduyar, together with the other 1997 Distinguished McKnight University Professors, was recognized by the President and Board of Regents of the University of Minnesota for "scholarly achievements that have brought honor and distinction to the University of Minnesota." |
