Underground Computing — The Computational Challenges and Opportunities of Simulating Flow and Reactive Transport in the Subsurface
Presentation Information
When: November 18, 2008, 11:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Dr. Tim Scheibe will discuss scientific and computational challenges and opportunities in simulating subsurface flow and transport across physical scales ranging from microns at the pore scale to kilometers at the aquifer-scale. Examples presented will include: 1) a 7-million particle simulation of pore-scale fluid flow and solute transport that was executed on the EMSL Chinook supercomputer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and 2) a 1-billion degree-of-freedom PFLOTRAN simulation of variably saturated groundwater flow and tracer transport at the Hanford Site 300 Area, a location where radioactive waste was buried for more than 30 years. This simulation was executed on the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The latter is the largest groundwater simulation successfully executed to date.