Overview
Alan Huber spent an entire career with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency studying how pollutants disperse on the wind through urban environments. The question is tricky and important to understanding urban air quality and how particulates disperse, whether they are the pollens, dust, and carbon monoxide fumes that are constantly carried through the urban environment, accidental emissions of pollutants, or emissions caused by anything from fires to building demolitions. Airflow is complicated by urban geography; narrow streets lined with skyscrapers and smaller buildings prevent air currents from moving uniformly across the cityscape and cause updrafts and downdrafts.
Since retiring from the EPA in 2007, Huber, now an adjunct faculty member with the Institute for the Environment at UNC Chapel Hill, has continued his research with help from RENCI visualization specialists and the computing power of UNC’s Topsail, a 520-node (4,160 processor) supercomputing cluster with a peak performance of nearly 29 teraflop/s. He’s interested in the micro-environments in urban areas; how particles disperse at a spatial scale of about one meter. Direct simulation of this kind of process has only been possible for a few years.
Simulations of such detailed movement of particles through real environments requires using computational fluid dynamics, numerical methods and algorithms that solve and analyze problems involving flows of fluids and gases over complex surfaces. The work is extremely computationally intensive: Huber used between 128 and 512 processors on the a UNC cluster. After simulating his data, he worked with RENCI to couple the output via high-speed networks to a state-of-the-art 4K resolution stereoscopic 3-dimensional environment at RENCI. The environment allows him to navigate through thousands of gigabytes of data in real-time interactive stereoscopic 3D at a native resolution over 4 times that of HDTV.
Overview
Alan Huber spent an entire career with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency studying how pollutants disperse on the wind through urban environments. The question is tricky and important to understanding urban air quality and how particulates disperse, whether they are the pollens, dust, and carbon monoxide fumes that are constantly carried through the urban environment, accidental emissions of pollutants, or emissions caused by anything from fires to building demolitions. Airflow is complicated by urban geography; narrow streets lined with skyscrapers and smaller buildings prevent air currents from moving uniformly across the cityscape and cause updrafts and downdrafts.
Since retiring from the EPA in 2007, Huber, now an adjunct faculty member with the Institute for the Environment at UNC Chapel Hill, has continued his research with help from RENCI visualization specialists and the computing power of UNC’s Topsail, a 520-node (4,160 processor) supercomputing cluster with a peak performance of nearly 29 teraflop/s. He’s interested in the micro-environments in urban areas; how particles disperse at a spatial scale of about one meter. Direct simulation of this kind of process has only been possible for a few years.
Simulations of such detailed movement of particles through real environments requires using computational fluid dynamics, numerical methods and algorithms that solve and analyze problems involving flows of fluids and gases over complex surfaces. The work is extremely computationally intensive: Huber used between 128 and 512 processors on the a UNC cluster. After simulating his data, he worked with RENCI to couple the output via high-speed networks to a state-of-the-art 4K resolution stereoscopic 3-dimensional environment at RENCI. The environment allows him to navigate through thousands of gigabytes of data in real-time interactive stereoscopic 3D at a native resolution over 4 times that of HDTV.
Project Team
David Borland
Partner
Alan Huber, Institute for the Environment, UNC Chapel Hill
