It will be decades before we fully understand the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon’s spill on the various environmental and ecological systems in the area.  LSU is working with several researchers and groups to attempt to discover some of the effects, and is using High Performance Computing and Scientific Visualization to analyze the possible effects of upcoming hurricanes on the spilled oil.  So far, a pair of researchers each got $10k and 500,000 CPU “cycles” (I assume they mean Hours, that’s the problem with a PR department that doesn’t understand computers) on LONI and TeraGrid to simulate the effects and then visualize the results.  It will be a bit different that most models as they have to couple both atmospheric with oceonographic models, and even with fish population models and oil spill models, all of which operate at different scales and resolutions.

For the first part of the project, the researchers who are part of Allen’s grant will create an oil spill model that treats the spilled oil as individual particles using the Cactus Computational Framework, an open-source environment that allows scientists and engineers to use high-performance computing resources more effectively. Once a model for oil particles is in place, the researchers will input data on different wind speeds and water current movements to see how the oil particles behave in extreme weather conditions.

Initial simulation will be repeats of Katrina and Gustav, using known measured data.  Then, they’ll venture into the unknown current and analyze the results.

“Being from southern Louisiana, it is very exciting to be a part of a project that can directly affect my home and the entire Gulf South,” said Edwin Mathews, an undergraduate mechanical engineering student working on the project. “On top of that, getting to work with a research group at a high-end facility like the CCT is a unique and eye-opening experience for an undergraduate student. Visualization is essential to the interpretation of the computational oil spill data, and being exposed to the inter-disciplinary workings of the project is something that will be of great value to me in the future.”

via News : LSU : Center for Computation & Technology.