Modeling of Tsunamis and Breaking Waves and their Impact on Built Infrastructure

Arif Masud, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Xiaodan Du will be using our code that we have developed to investigate free-surface wave action on built civil infrastructure. He will be introduced to the process of making geometric and finite element models and perform benchmark studies on a series of flow problems to verify the stability of the new methods and the code. He will be introduced to visualization techniques to extract quantities of interest and to investigate flow features involved in this class of problems.

A critical component of this research will be conducted by running simulations on the Blue Waters supercomputer. Xiaodan will work with the mentors to learn how to utilize computational science and high performance computing resources (Blue Waters) to carry out simulations of extreme natural flows and integrating data mining and visualization techniques to quantify the results. Xiaodan, who has background in structural engineering, will work with Lixing Zhu who is developing the new code and it is running successfully on the Blue Waters system. Xiaodan will have the unique opportunity to run the beta-version of the code and in the process learn the intricacies of HPC.  The Blue Waters platform is ideally suited for this class of problems not only because of massive parallel problems that need to be executed, but also because of the unique features of our code that are ideally suited for the Blue Waters hardware architecture.