HPCwire: LSU Professor Receives NSF Funding to Explore Alternative Energy Source

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

July 29, 2009

LSU Professor Receives NSF Funding to Explore Alternative Energy Source

BATON ROUGE, July 29 -- The National Science Foundation, or NSF, has awarded funding to Blaise Bourdin, an associate professor with the LSU Department of Mathematics and an adjunct faculty member with the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, for his proposal, "Applications of Variational Fracture: Enhanced Geothermal Systems."

This proposal is funded through NSF funds stemming from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Enhanced geothermal systems are an alternative energy source in which heat is created when water circulates through artificially simulated fractures in rocks. Although intensely researched, enhanced geothermal systems are not widely used to produce energy.

Bourdin's research in this proposal will examine the mechanisms scientists can use to create these artificial fractures and expand the use of geothermal systems, creating a clean, renewable, affordable and widely available energy source.

The group will combine mathematics, computational science and engineering research to better study these systems. The National Science Foundation funding will support the research of two undergraduate students and one graduate student for three years.

Using the University's supercomputers and the resources of the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, or LONI, Bourdin's group will develop new models to create artificial fractures that produce energy. They will use supercomputers to get a more accurate idea of how this process works and conduct large-scale experiments to test their findings.

This project is the first step in what Bourdin intends to develop into a larger, multi-disciplinary research initiative at the CCT. Bourdin works with the Coast to Cosmos Focus Area at CCT, which looks at how high-performance computing can help scientists get a better understanding of physical processes in earth, space and the environment.

For more information on CCT research, visit www.cct.lsu.edu. To see more details on Bourdin's research, visit http://www.math.lsu.edu/~bourdin.

-----

Source: LSU Center for Computation & Technology

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Florida State Gives Virtual SMPs a Spin

The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...

HPC Powers Bobsled Team to Olympic Gold

For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Gelsinger Stuns Analysts and Colleagues with Storage Pool Plan

Mar 15 | The Register | EMC's grand vision for unified global storage. Read more...

Cisco Containers Target Federal Market

Mar 15 | Data Center Knowledge | Company delivers UCS-container solution to NASA. Read more...

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html