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UT computing center working to improve storm surge predictions [Austin American-Statesman]
[October 19, 2014]

UT computing center working to improve storm surge predictions [Austin American-Statesman]


(Austin American-Statesman (TX) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Oct. 20-- The visualization lab at the University of Texas' Advanced Computing Center looks like the villain's lair in a James Bond movie: a dark room with metal floor panels covering hundreds of wires, illuminated by a long wall of synchronized monitors controlled by a giant touch-screen computer.



Only here, the masterminds are working on ways to avert disasters.

UT's supercomputing research arm is part of a coalition of universities behind ADCIRC, a computer program that predicts and simulates storm surges. Now the coalition is receiving a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to update the computer code, with the goal of providing more timely predictions for the emergency responders who need to make decisions on evacuations and other response efforts.


As it is now, running a simple storm surge prediction off the coast of Texas may take several hours and require thousands of individual processors housed at UT, said Craig Michoski, a research associate at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, or ICES.

"So reducing and/or optimizing the time it takes to run these simulations is tantamount to increasing the overall utility of ADCIRC for providing, for example, real-time flood predictions for emergency response management teams," Michoski said.

First developed in the mid-1990s, ADCIRC has been used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, and academic researchers to simulate and predict water flow in coastal areas. During the Deep Water Horizon oil spill, the program was also used to predict oil dispersal paths up to three days in advance.

The program runs on the massive bank of computers housed at UT, but the students and professors here collaborate with researchers at Louisiana State University, the University of Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"It's a big part of what is affecting the coastlines of most of America, and that we are one of the schools that get to participate in it is pretty significant," said Lauren Constant, ICES administrative associate.

The current storm surge prediction process relies on feeding hurricane data, such as wind field and coastal topography, into the computer program, which uses seemingly endless rows of orange connective wiring and towering, monolithic high-performance computers to generate data about potential flooding patterns.

The program produces several potential scenarios. In the case of storm surges, this information informs emergency response and evacuation plans and helps create maps.

A goal for the new system, dubbed STORM, is to work twice as fast as ADCIRC, enabling larger and more accurate storm surge predictions to be made within an hour of receiving data inputs.

"One of the big challenges of this grant is to work on the mathematics and computer science issues that arise when you try to keep your code up-to-date on platforms of the future," said Clint Dawson, director of the ICES Computational Hydraulics Group.

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