Subsurface Modeling (A5)
Project PI: Mary Wheeler
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Research at the Center for Subsurface Modeling (CSM) focuses on simulation of environmental contamination, remediation and monitoring, and on petroleum reservoir simulation. Groundwater contamination and remediation problems in particular involve modeling tens to hundreds of chemical components, flowing in a multiphase (air, water, soil), three-dimensional, heterogeneous environment. Geochemical and biogeochemical reactions generally take place at time-scales much smaller than the flow time scale, therefore small time steps are often required. Moreover, these reactions can induce sharp chemical concentration fronts, which must be resolved accurately. A typical simulation requires the solution of nonlinear systems of equations involving thousands to millions of unknowns for many time steps.
The CSM is developing numerical methods and appropriate computational science tools for tackling these large-scale problems. Crucial to this effort is the development of scaleable parallel codes which can migrate across platforms. Interactive visualization and steering of simulations is also important for efficiently determining appropriate simulation parameters. Researchers at the CSM have been investigating the use of parallel computation and interactive visualization for these problems for the past several years. Several simulators (e.g., PARSIM--a parallel aquifer and reservoir simulator) have been developed by the Center. Under the proposed research, faculty in the CSM will investigate simulation of surface and groundwater flows using loosely and tightly coupled clusters of Intel systems.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
The CSM will investigate the migration of several of their simulators, including PARSIM, PADCIRC (a parallel hydrodynamic flow simulator), and PARWQM (a parallel surface water quality model) to clusters of Intel processors. The results of these portings will be presented at our annual industrial affiliates meeting and to our research partners at the Waterways Experiment Station (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), the Texas Water Development Board, and Department of Energy Laboratories. The CSM will also investigate the porting of a new generation parallel simulator being developed under a Department of Energy Advanced Computational Technology Initiative.
IMPACT
The proposed research will have a high impact because the CSM Lab is collaborating with several agencies on environmental remediation and will provide a testbed application. The work will also help migrate high performance Intel products into the graduate research environment.
EQUIPMENT
We propose cluster configurations (loose and tight clusters) with supporting networking hardware. Year 1 - 16 Uniprocessors; 1 Dual Processors with high graphics; 17 Monitors; Year 2 - 1 Dual Processors with high graphics; 7 Dual Processors; 8 Monitors; Year 3 - 3 Uniprocessors; 6 Dual Processors with high graphics; 1 Dual Processor; 5 Monitors.
RESOURCES
The CSM Lab will provide laboratory space and research faculty, post-doctoral fellow and graduate student support for the application studies. The CSM Lab is a research unit of TICAM.
BENEFITS TO INTEL
The computational power of clusters of PC's now rivals that of many large-scale (and substantially more costly) parallel supercomputing systems. Therefore, it is essential for us to migrate our parallel simulators to PC cluster platforms and alert our industrial affiliates in the petroleum environmental industries of our successes.