A Wildland Fire Model with Data Assimilation for High Performance Computing Environments

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                Joint Seminar
============================================================
The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
	and
Department of Mathematics
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Speaker:	Professor Craig C. DOUGLAS
		Departments of Computer Science
		University of Kentucky and Yale University

Title:		"A Wildland Fire Model with Data Assimilation
		 for High Performance Computing Environments"

Date:		Monday, 17 March 2008

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre, near lifts 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

A wildfire model is formulated based on balance equations for energy and
fuel, where the fuel loss due to combustion corresponds to the fuel
reaction rate. The resulting coupled partial differential equations have
coefficients that can be approximated from prior measurements of
wildfires. An Ensemble Kalman Filter technique is then used to assimilate
temperatures measured at selected points into running wildfire
simulations. The assimilation technique is able to modify the simulations
to track the measurements correctly even if the simulations were started
with an erroneous ignition location that is quite far away from the
correct one.

This model is part of a dynamic data-driven application system (DDDAS).
Such systems tax high performance computing systems and networks in ways
that are nontraditional for supercomputer centers. How a DDDAS does so
will be described in our context.


This is joint work with Lynn S. Bennethum, Jonathan D. Beezley, Minjeong
Kim, Jan Mandel, Janice L. Coen and Anthony Vodacek.


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Biography:

Professor DOUGLAS is a professor of computer science and mechanical
engineering at the University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY, USA). He is also
a senior research scientist of computer science at Yale University (New
Haven, CT, USA). During academic year 2007-2008 he is a visiting professor
of mathematics and computer science at Texas A&M University (College
Station, TX, USA). Prof. DOUGLAS holds a Ph.D. from Yale University. He
has worked at Duke University (Durham, NC, USA) and IBM's Thomas J. Watson
Research Center (Yorktown Heights, NY, USA) in the past. He maintains
http://www.mgnet.org/ and http://www.dddas.org/.