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.
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