Texas A&M researcher receives grant for 'supercomputing' work

A Texas A&M researcher received grant to expand the work that he said has "world-changing potential," with the ability to simplify research in subjects that run the gamut from plant root growth to the cause of earthquakes and the impact of air pollution on Roman statues.

Mathematics professor Wolfgang Bangerth created the software program deal.II to make "supercomputing" simpler, which is used by hundreds of researchers around the world to study various topics, including glacier mechanics and heart muscle fiber simulation using complex equations containing billions of variables.

Recently, the National Science Foundation gave him the $1.3 million grant to help expand the software's uses and make it more adaptable for and accessible to researchers.

"For us, this is validation that what we are doing is right," Bangerth said. "We're helping others. We want to provide the infrastructure for other researchers in as broad a way as possible ... There's a need for this. There's not a lot of software for people doing research on projects that have billions of variables."

The specialized computing clusters use tens of thousands or more computers stacked and grounded together to pool processing power. Some have more than a million processor cores. A system at the University of Texas at Austin, which also received a grant from the National Science Foundation, has 102,400 processor cores.

Bangerth is working with a center at the University of California to study a hypothesis about the cause of earthquakes. The computing power is needed to accurately model the turbulent convections of heat ebbing and flowing from the Earth to its surface. The task requires thousands computers to provide a simulation, he said.

Bangerth said a couple dozen researchers across the world currently help him with refining the software to expand these systems and make them more accessible to researchers.

The software is open source, meaning it's available for free to anyone.

"It's a way for us to share what we do as academic researchers," Bangerth said. "My personal view is, I'm paid by the taxpayer, and whatever I do should be out there in the open for everybody. That's my goal: creating knowledge for the taxpayer. That's why we do it open source."