Defense project boosts supercomputer research

Contact: Maridith Geuder

A national submarine design project is earning Mississippi State University researchers special Department of Defense supercomputer resources.

Mechanical engineering professor Roger Briley, aerospace engineering professor David Whitfield and research engineer Lafayette Taylor lead a team that recently won a highly competitive DOD Grand Challenge award. All are with the university's National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation.

"This work will contribute to improved design of submarines, as well as improved safety of existing submarines undergoing complicated maneuvers," Briley said.

Using computer codes developed at Mississippi State, the researchers will make computational predictions in how submarines can be expected to maneuver. The team also will develop computer simulations that are possible only with powerful parallel computers.

As part of Grand Challenge, Defense and other federal agencies reserve 20 percent of supercomputer resource time for projects supporting their goals and missions, Briley explained. The projects represent high-priority, computationally-intensive work supported by the military's High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

Focusing on computational simulations of submarine maneuvering, Mississippi State's research effort is earning 230,000 processor hours at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center at the University of Alaska and at the Army Research Laboratory's Major Shared Resource Center in Maryland.

"Our time amounts to about a 25 percent allocation of that entire computer system," Briley said.

The computer time will be shared with collaborators at the Navy's David Taylor Research Center, also in Maryland, and at Pennsylvania State University's Applied Research Laboratory.

The Mississippi State team will use powerful Cray T3E processors to compute solutions for full-scale maneuvering submarines with propulsors, as well as related smaller simulations.

Also part of the Mississippi State team are engineers Ramesh Pankajakshan, Chunhua Shen and Min-Yee Jiang.