SBU-Led Research Team Receives INCITE Award
Aimed at reducing uncertainty in modeling turbulent combustion
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| James Glimm |
STONY BROOK, NY, November 29, 2011 – A team of researchers led byJames Glimm, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook University, has been awarded 35 million hours of supercomputing time on the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, one of only 60 projects chosen for the 2012 U. S. Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) awards. The team will run calculations exploring the turbulence of fluids and stochastic convergence for turbulent combustion.
“The larger purpose of the calculation and the project it is serving is to estimate uncertainties and errors associated with complex engineering design studies,” said Professor Glimm, the Principal Investigator of this project. “Here we eliminate a model for the flame structure, and rely on more basic equations of the laws of chemical reactions. In the process, we can identify errors or uncertainties in other calculations that still use such models.”
Professor Glimm is a past president of the American Mathematical Society and a 2002 recipient of the National Medal of Science given by former President George W. Bush. He received the American Mathematical Society’s Steele Prize (1992) and the American Physical Society’s Heineman Prize (1980). The Department of Energy has also adopted Professor Glimm’s front-track methodology for shock-wave calculations (simulating weapons performance).
Members of this research team include Professor Glimm, Xiangmin Jiao and Xiaolin Li from Stony Brook University; Mirko Gamba, Johan Larsson and Parviz Moin from Stanford University; Vitali Morozov of Argonne National Laboratory and David Sharp of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Additionally, two Stony Brook professors from the Department of Physics and Astronomy are co-investigators on two separate INCITE projects investigating supernovae: Professor Alan Calder (with Research Assistant Aaron Jackson) is part of a University of Chicago team that has been awarded 40 million processor hours to verify and validate Type Ia supernova models; Professor Michael Zingale is part of a UC Santa Cruz team that has been awarded 46 million processor hours to simulate a Type Ia supernova model using three distinct codes.
Co-managed by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the INCITE awards will provide a total of nearly 1.7 billion processor hours to this year’s chosen research projects aimed at addressing scientific and engineering challenges of national and global importance. The supercomputers housed at these two laboratories are the fastest and largest research computers in the United States.
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© Stony Brook University 2011
