A Distributed Computing Approach to Large-Scale Environmental Modeling

This document is still under construction. Please be patient and direct your comments and suggestions to the address given below.

Contents

Introduction

 The Grand Challenge - Environmental Modeling project is a joint project between the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Funding for this project was provided by the National Science Foundation under the Grand Challenge Program in High Performance Computing and Communications.

Motivation

In the past, the only way to determine the efficacy of control strategies was to implement an Air Quality Management Plan and measure the results. Essentially this used the atmosphere as the best laboratory for experimentation. The development of computational models of the physical and chemical processes that take place in the atmosphere allows experimentation on different control strategies without the extraordinary expense and difficulty of a "real-world" implementation.

Clearly, this paradigm shift is attractive. Many more strategies may be studied. Each without fear of damaging the real environment. The system being developed as part of this effort will also help environmental modelers to better understand the cause and effect relationships at play in complex environmental models.

Interdisciplinary Group

The Grand Challenge project is being pursued by several groups within Carnegie Mellon University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Development of the science and algorithms behind the air quality model is done by a group led by Dr. Ted Russell in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at CMU and a group led by Dr. Greg McRae in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. The computational system used to solve the model is being developed by a group under Dr. Peter Steenkiste in the School of Computer Science at CMU and the interface between the user and the computing environment is being developed under Dr. Bernd Bruegge in the School of Computer Science at CMU.

GEMS Framework Grand Challenge Project GEMS Framework

If you have comments or problems concerning this document, please contact: Erik Riedel (riedel+@cmu.edu)
CMU/HPCC/Version 1.0/12-Nov-94/er1p