A fine-grained approach to “cool” simulations

When deciding how to best design equipment in a chemical plant that produces liquid nitrogen, the designers must know the properties of the mixture of nitrogen and oxygen gas at various stages as it cools and compresses. Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo have developed a new simulation technique that will make calculating the properties of any gas much more efficient.

The new technique involves running simulations on the grid that would not be feasible on a single computer because they require such large amounts of computing power. Andrew Schultz, a SUNY at Buffalo chemical and biological engineering researcher, said Open Science Grid (OSG) is “the ideal workhorse” to run the simulations. Schultz and his team have run more than 60,000 jobs on OSG resources since January – an order of magnitude jump in their productivity.

Feature - Profile

Erwin Laure

After six-and-a-half years working for EGEE, Erwin Laure is leaving for the high-performance supercomputing center in Stockholm, where he will be overseeing servers and storage.

He says “It will be interesting. But I will have to get used to Swedish dishes such as ‘surströmming,’ or fermented herring . . . I think fermented is another word for ‘rotten.’ ”

Feature - NUS Grid

Cycle harvesting

At the National University of Singapore, researchers had a problem: It was taking days, if not weeks, to run a computation.

The situation encountered by one researcher at the NUS Business School, Dr Ding, was typical. He found that each simulation he needed to do took over 10 days to execute on a desktop computer.

Clearly, something had to be done.

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Medical Manager

Doctors in Amsterdam may soon have more time in their schedules to spend with patients.