CHEMISTRY

The Cornell Theory Center (CTC), an interdisciplinary research center at Cornell University focused on providing cyberinfrastructure resources for research and education, has been awarded more than $171,000 through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP). The award was a result of a competition for DURIP funding initiated by the Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, and Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The award will be used to purchase a dedicated Terascale computing cluster to support the research of Stephen Pope, Cornell Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, proposals were requested from “university investigators who were currently working on research that was of importance for the Department of Defense (DoD)”. There were 199 awards given to 112 academic institutions. AFOSR, the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are funding Pope’s ongoing work on the development of improved computational methodologies for the modeling and simulation of turbulent combustion. Explains Pope, “In space and aircraft applications, the design of combustors in propulsion systems remains a significant technical challenge. The usual design and development procedures include both computer modeling and experimental testing. In all of the relevant applications, testing is extremely expensive and time consuming; and indeed for some space applications, the appropriate conditions cannot be achieved at reasonable cost in ground tests. Because of this, reliable and accurate computer models are continually being sought to increase combustor performance and to reduce both the development costs and the design cycle time.” As the methodology for this research is computationally demanding it requires high-performance computing. CTC Senior Research Associate Steven Lantz, who is co-investigator on the grant, collaborates with Pope on parallel computing aspects of the research. Pope and Lantz have created extensions to the commercial FLUENT (computational fluid dynamics software created by Fluent, Inc.) code that enable it to use jointly-developed parallel algorithms for combustion calculations. The new cluster will allow them to continue to refine the parallel techniques and share their experience and knowledge in large-scale parallel computing with graduate students. The DURIP cluster will contain at least 32 nodes and each node will have two dual-core processors so that over 128 parallel processes can be run efficiently. The cluster will be housed and maintained at CTC.