User Research Gallery

The Fulton HPC Initiative supplies computational capabilities to many researchers at ASU. Below is a sampling of visualizations from a few of the problems researchers are solving with HPCI systems.

Turbulent Flow

HPC technology is well-adapted to the complexity of computational fluid dynamics. This project involved the modeling of turbulent flow, crucial to the design of such mechanical systems as cars, planes, and pipelines. This image shows turbulent flow around the body of a rotorcraft in flight.

Golf Ball Design

In collaboration with the HPCI, ASU's Decision Theater, and industry partners, mechanical and aerospace engineering researchers from the Fulton School applied techniques for modeling aerodynamic flow around objects such as aircraft to the simulation of golf ball performance. Read more under News.

Environmental Fluid Dynamics

The San Diego Wildfires project was produced by the Environmental Fluid Dynamics group at ASU. The resulting images depict what happened to the smoke and pollution from the October 2003 wildfire in San Diego. They are an aggregate of multiple simulations at the local and national scale, produced by complex climate modeling techniques to simulate the physical processes involved, such as the changes in air temperature and pressure.

Solid State Science

A common engineering challenge for space shuttles, communication satellites, and other spacecraft is corrosion caused by "atomic oxygen," which attacks metals in the upper atmosphere. Materials science researchers used the lab to model the possible scenarios caused at different impact energies: oxygen can either oxidize the material and modify its composition, ionize it by stealing electrons, or change it by cutting molecules apart. They then modeled the results of the use of special polymers which resist atomic oxygen at any impact energy, protecting the craft from damage.

Silicon-Germanium alloys

An electrical engineering application of high performance technology is the modeling of the chemical processes involved in the creation of material alloys. Current electronics are made from silicon, which has at this point been pushed as far as it can be in terms of its potential speed and power. Researchers on this project used supercomputing power to model the process that could be used to make a potential substitute, a hybrid of silicon and germanium. The video shows the result: at very high temperatures, we can make a gas of silicon and germanium, and cause that gas to attach itself to a silicon base, making new kinds of devices possible.

Carbon Sequestration

Another current materials research problem is carbon sequestration, or how to remove and store carbon from the atmosphere, as part of the effort to mitigate the effects of global warming. The most promising technology so far is outgassing carbon dioxide into magnesium silicate to form a white powder composed of magnesium carbonate. The problem researchers tried to address in this project is that magnesium extraction causes glass to form on the surface, inhibiting the reaction by preventing the extraction of magnesium. This simulation used a combination of quantum and classical methods to understand and model the process.

Biophysics, protein mutation

This project is from the Single Molecule Biophysics Institute, part of ASU's Biodesign Institute. Simulation techniques using knowledge of the physical properties of molecules made it possible to study the effects of point mutations on the folding structures of proteins.