by Ilya Zaslavsky, GIS Staff Scientist, the Ed Center
Education Center on Computational
Science and Engineering - the mission is to support incorporation of
high-performance computing tools in undergraduate education.
The Ed Center is a part of NPACI, National Partnership of Advanced Computational Infrastructure, an NSF-supported association of 39 universities and research centers across the country focused on building national metacomputing environment through development of computer-demanding applications and shared use of supercomputers. The leading edge center of NPACI is San Diego Supercomputer Center. Another NSF-supported partnership is centered in Champaign-Urbana (alliance.ncsa.uiuc.edu).
This project at UT-Austin (Center for Sub-Surface Modeling) simulated the dynamics of oil reservoirs to improve the ways geologists clean up contaminated aquifers and drill for petroleum and natural gas. IPARS (Integrated Parallel Accurate Reservoir Simulator) is developed to model fluids behavior in underground reservoirs, taking into account three phases (solid, liquid, and gas), and chemical interactions between them. Simulating black-oil dynamics over 1000 days by a million gridblocks took 30 minutes on 64 nodes of an IBM SP, while it would have taken months on a workstation.
The mantle's movement reveals itself through such forces as volcanoes, earthquakes, and continental drift. This project at UC-Los Angeles simulated thermal convection the Earth's mantle in three dimensions, taking into account the solid-state phase transitions, chemical composition differences, and thermodynamic properties at different depths. Simulations showed that the true picture of thermal convection seems to lie between the extremes of layered and whole-mantle models.
This project at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, models seismic vibrations moving through the ground, in order to explain how the ground moves during strong earthquakes (Steven Day, SDSU, is a part of this project). The project is using more complex non-linear model describing earthquacke intensity and potential earthquacke damage as a function of magnitude, distance to epicenter, and local geology. "A typical 2-D wave calculation on a 256x256 grid for 2,000 time steps takes eight hours on a Sun SPARC 10 workstation with 10 MB of memory, while a single 3-D time step takes up to five hours". NPACI supercomputers will support a realistic 3D modeling of seismic wave propagation.
You can find more examples in the enVision magazine published by NPACI!
Of particular interest to geologists will be 3D visualization with the Telemanufacturing facility (Professor Frost has experience with this device); using remote sensing imagery, the Alexandria digital library.