Suresh Menon - US grants

9411846 Yalamanchili The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the School of Aerospace Engineering, the College of Computing and the School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology will purchase a cluster of multiprocessor and uniprocessor graphics workstations interconnected by state of the art high speed communications networks to existing parallel supercomputers. This tested will provide a feasible hardware basis to pursue the development and application of new computational paradigms for large scale engineering applications. In particular, we foresee the ability to harness such high speed networks of specialized graphics and parallel machines such that components of applications can utilize distinct parallel machines while results from these distinct platforms can be visualized, integrated and manipulated in real-time on workstations. This integration opens new avenues for solutions to solving many large problem. The research projects that will be the primarily users of the equipment are drawn from the development of large scale engineering applications, and the technology to realize an integrated, interactive for engineering applications.

With the support of NSF, the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech will develop a highly flexible, readily expandable, and low-cost Heterogeneous Computer Environment for Parallel Processing (HCEPP) to provide the primary computational resources for the majority of computational engineering research within the School. The facility will be developed on three floors of the 62-year old Guggenheim Building and is being undertaken in conjunction with building-wide renovations financed by the institution. For over 60 years, the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech has been a national leader in engineering research and research training including activities in fluid dynamics, materials, diagnostics, turbulence, combustion, design optimization, concurrent engineering, and multimedia and complex aerospace system simulation. For several decades, this activity has relied on the use of powerful mainframe computers located in central campus facilities. However, computing technology has provided geometrically expanding computational capabilities in increasingly smaller systems, and these developments have obsoleted the mainframe computer in favor of networked high- performance workstations operating in tightly clustered groups. NSF support will renovate research space within the Guggenheim Building to create an environment for the integration of local computers and high-speed network communications. Funds will be used to develop high-speed FDDI Hubs with Ethernet Switching Hubs for the Ethernet-equipped workstations. Renovations supported under this grant will also provide a pro-rata share of improvements to the building infrastructure including installation of new HVAC capability, and installation of appropriate electrical and fire protection systems. Increased, and dedicated, HVAC capability will be added to meet the specific needs associated with the HCEPP facilities which are in discipline-specific computational labs distributed throughout the three floor environment. The renovated facilities will offer opportunities for new research endeavors including the integration of design, simulation, and large-scale computation involved in multidisciplinary efforts such as the High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT); the modeling and simulation of turbulence/chemistry interactions in entire engines; airframe and engine integration and fluid-structure interactions in new aerospace vehicles; and modeling of pollutant dispersion in the atmosphere. Additional students will be able to participate in the research activities through the reconfiguration and rehabilitation of existing space. Currently 76 are enrolled in the program; it is anticipated that research and research training capacity will increase to 158 students (a 107% increase) with completion of the new facilities. Students, including program participants from Clark-Atlanta University, will work with 8 faculty members to explore capabilities in concurrent engineering -- integrating state-of-the-art scientific computational tools interacting automatically with optimization tools, geometrical engines, and tools for analyzing manufacturability and maintainability of products.

This award provides funding for a two-year collaborative project between the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) at Mississippi State University on Computational Field Simulation and the Computational Combustion Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This project will develop state-of-the-art large-eddy simulation (LES) techniques for non-equilibrium, reactive fluid flows, implement these models into a state-of-the-art computer code being developed at the ERC, validate the physical accuracy of the resulting simulations by comparison with benchmark calculations and experimental data, and visualize the physics and processes involved. This effort brings together expertise developed at the ERC in high-performance computing and numerical techniques for reactive flows with the knowledge developed at Georgia Tech in turbulence modeling, large-eddy simulation, and combustion simulation. The LES capabilities will be added in a computationally efficient manner with the Loci framework being developed at the ERC. Loci is a C++ library that implements a specification system for the development of unstructured numerical applications.