Concrete Flow Researchers to Use Argonne Supercomputer

The Argonne National Laboratory of the Department of Energy (DoE) announced on Jan. 17, 2008, that a team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been awarded 750,000 central processing unit (CPU) hours on the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. The allocation is one of 55 awards of supercomputer time given in a peer-reviewed competition known as the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. The NIST team of William George, Judith Terrill, Nicos Martys, John Hagedorn and Edward Garboczi will use the granted time to study the flow, dispersion and merging of densely suspended, diversely sized and shaped materials (primarily cement in concrete) under a variety of conditions. Access to the Argonne machine will allow computer modeling at a level and range impossible with existing facilities at NIST. The ability to better model real conditions will significantly improve the scientific basis for prediction and measurement of the flow properties of concrete. A DoE Web site on the award is at www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/incite/index.html. A nonphotorealistic image from a computer simulation showing 2,025 rocks. Rocks with high stress values are colored solid and have their stress values painted on the surface. The remaining rocks are displayed as outlines. Visualization provided by Marc Olano and Steven Satterfield, NIST