Application
of High-Performance Computing
to
Modeling Regional Groundwater Flow
Professors
Alan J. Rabideau, Igor Jankovic, Matthew Becker (Geology), and
Douglas Flewelling (Geography)
With
increasing population growth and reliance on groundwater sources
for drinking water, the protection of groundwater supplies has
become increasingly important. Computer models are frequently
used to analyze regional groundwater flow patterns and assess
the impacts of pumping and potential contamination sources. To
capitalize on the recent explosion in computing power, UB researchers
are developing the next generation of groundwater flow models.
Implemented on massively parallel supercomputers, the models will
be capable of representing the combined influence of millions
of hydrologic features such as rivers, lakes, pumping wells, and
contamination sources.
 Development
of computer models for large applications is inherently a multidisciplinary
task. For this $1-million EPA-sponsored project, the UB team
includes faculty and students from the following disciplines:
· Environmental
Engineers
who develop the mathematical algorithms to efficiently simulate
complex groundwater flow patterns using the
Analytic Element Method.
·
Geographers who
utilize Geographic Information Science (GIS) to manage
the data needed
for large-scale applications.
·
Hydrogeologists who
identify and assemble the complex geologic information needed
for particular applications, and
·
Computer
Scientists from
UB’s Center for Computational Research.
The
current EPA-funded project will lead to the release of software
that can be used for a variety of applications such as the development
of state-wide strategies for groundwater
protection, the assessment of the regional impacts of waste disposal
facilities such as the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear storage
site, and modeling the impact of global climate change on groundwater
supplies.
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