Team for Advanced Flow Simulation and Modeling

For more information:
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AHPCRC Bulletin: Summer 1997 - Volume 7 Number 3

1997 Summer Institute for Undergraduates

Barbara Bryan (AHPCRC-NetworkCS)

Charles Reinke (JSU) presenting his project results at the end of the Summer Institute.

David Butler (Bowie State University), Libby Garrard (Carleton College), and Katie Hetchler (UM) working together on their homework assignment.

Mark McKelvin and Tyann Osborne (CAU) working with Shahrouz Aliabadi (AHPCRC-CAU), their project supervisor.

This year fifteen students attended the Summer Institute. These students came from Bowie State (BSU), Clark Atlanta (CAU), Florida A&M, Howard, Jackson State (JSU), and Stanford Universities, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Washington. They participated in HPC research projects in geographic information systems, graph partitioning, groundwater modeling, and flow simulation and modeling.

The objectives of the Summer Institute are to educate the students about the importance of HPC in science and engineering, to provide students with an accelerated learning experience in scientific computing tools which they can use in their academic work, and to encourage students to pursue graduate studies and careers in computational science and engineering. Participants in the Institute are typically sophomores and juniors, and come from a wide variety of physical sciences, mathematics, computer science, and engineering disciplines.

The Summer Institute program consists of three integrated components: training in HPC, research projects in computational science and engineering, and seminars. The seminars emphasize interactions with computational scientists and engineers who are currently working in defense technology.

The Summer Institute HPC training activities include intensive classes and practice sessions on programming for scientists and engineers using FORTRAN and C. Emphasis is on efficient programming for parallel distributed-memory and symmetric multiprocessing HPC systems. These systems include the SGI/CRAY T3D and T3E and IBM RS/6000 SP systems (as distributed memory systems) and SGI Power Challenge Arrays (as symmetric multiprocessor). Students were also introduced to the use of MPI on distributed-memory computers. Additional classes and training sessions were taught on graphics and visualization in scientific computation.

Preparation for the research projects is provided through a series of guest lectures on technology areas in computer science, environmental modeling and fluid mechanics. These lectures were given by university, Army, and industry researchers, and emphasized the use of HPC in real-world problems. Field trips to 3M and SGI/Cray Research were part of the program and emphasized the role of computational science in industry. Subsequently, students were assigned research projects. The projects either required the development of scientific software or the application of third party software to problems in science and engineering. The projects had a four-week duration. A synopsis of some of the projects follows.

David Butler, from BSU, worked with George Karypis and Vipin Kumar to develop software to be used in conjunction with METIS (a graph partitioning library developed by Karypis and Kumar) to do adaptive mesh partitioning. By implementing a multi-level diffusion algorithm, Butler extended the capability of METIS to deal with meshes that are being adaptively refined.

Partitioning a mesh adaptively by using the AHPCRC graph partitioning software METIS was a project undertaken by David Butler (Bowie State University).
Andrea Sealy's (JSU) project involved modeling chemicals infiltrating groundwater in central Minnesota.	CAU students Tyann Osborne and Mark McKelvin used software developed at the Center to study the airflow around a simplified helicopter model.

Andrea Sealy (JSU) analyzed the loading of water and chemicals to the groundwater beneath a topographic depression at a location in Central Minnesota. Her project involved using the FEMWATER model in the Groundwater Modeling System (GMS). GMS is the package used at the US Army Corps of Engineers, Waterways Experiment Station for analysis of groundwater contamination sites. The steps in the modeling effort involved analysis of data from the Central Minnesota site, creation of a mesh to model the subsurface geometry, analysis using the FEMWATER model, and graphical display of the results. The groundwater projects were led by John Nieber of the AHPCRC-UM.

Tyann Osborne and Mark McKelvin (CAU) worked on a project involving flow simulation around simplified helicopter models. This project used flow simulation software developed at the AHPCRC by the Team for Advanced Flow Simulation and Modeling (T*AFSM). The geometric modeling and mesh generation were carried out by using a software which also was developed at the AHPCRC by the T*AFSM. These computations were done on the CRAY T3D. In addition, the students tested a new geometric modeling package being developed at the AHPCRC and provided feedback to the developers on functionality and usability. The flow simulation project was supervised by Shahrouz Aliabadi of the AHPCRC-CAU.

Students celebrated their graduation from the Summer Institute with a riverboat dinner cruise on the Mississipi River.

Students celebrated their graduation with a riverboat dinner cruise on the Mississippi River. Following the cruise, Walter Sturek, Contracting Officer's Representative for the AHPCRC, and William Mermagen, Director, Corporate Information and Computing Center, both of the Army Research Laboratory, presented the students certificates of accomplishment.

Multi-objective Graph Partitioning
Margaret Reitz (University of Washington) and Dan Howard (Stanford University)

Repartitioning of Adaptively Refined Meshes
David Butler (Bowie State University)

Groundwater Flow Around Dams
Elizabeth Garrard (Carleton College) and Katie Hetchler (University of Minnesota)

Estimation of Depression Focused Recharge
Andrea Sealy (Jackson State University)

Remediation of Landfill Leachate
Joe Lee (University of Minnesota)

Evaluation of Pesticide Transport from Near an Agricultural Chemical Distributor
Moses Fasanya (Florida A&M University)

In-situ Leaching of Contaminants from Soil
Lisa Tilman (University of Minnesota)

Numerical Simulation of Aerodynamics of Helicopters
Mark McKelvin and Tyann Osborne (Clark Atlanta University)

Internet Based Graphics User Interface for Geographic Information Systems
Timothy Ward (Jackson State University)

High Performance Spatial Database of a Geographic Information System
Tamara Gray (Clark Atlanta University) and Selamawit Gebre-Amlak (Florida A&M University)