UMass Researcher Allocated Supercomputer Access Through DOE INCITE Program

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Stephen de Bruyn Kops, mechanical and industrial engineering, and a team of researchers recently received an award of supercomputer access from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science through its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

The awards, which will pursue transformational advances in science and engineering, account for 60 percent of the available time on the leadership-class supercomputers at the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

de Bruyn Kops is the principle investigator leading a team of scientists from the University of Washington, University of Cambridge and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a project studying fluids and turbulence.

Stably stratified turbulence (SST) is a model flow for understanding fluid flows that are highly intermittent and anisotropic at large scales. The understanding derived from SST is important for applications ranging from climate modeling, to pollution mitigation, to deep sea mining, to military operations over cold land or ice. SST is also valuable for enhancing fundamental turbulence theory on turbulent/non-turbulent interfaces, internal intermittency, and anisotropic multi-scale energetics.

With this project, de Bruyn Kops and team will advance understanding and modeling of stratified turbulence and the dynamic range required to understand this region of parameter space. They will be given access to supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to further their work, crossing the cusp in terms of turbulence dynamic range and better understanding a fluid flow regime not currently accessible for research by other methods.

Jointly managed by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), the INCITE program is the primary means by which the facilities fulfill their mission to advance open science by providing the scientific community with access to their powerful supercomputing resources. The ALCF and OLCF are DOE Office of Science User Facilities. 

Open to any researcher or research organization in the world with a computationally intensive project, INCITE’s application process is highly competitive. For the 2021 allocation period, the total numberof node hours requested by applicants was nearly four times what the program was able to award.

The INCITE program promotes transformational advances in science and technology through large allocations of time on state-of-the-art supercomputers. For more information, visit: http://www.doeleadershipcomputing.org/.