Understanding Fluid Flow in Microchannels using a CometCloud-based Federated HPC infrastructure

Project Information

Discipline

Engineering Science and Engineering Physics (107) 

Subdiscipline

14.13 Engineering Science 

Orientation

Research 

The ability to control fluid streams at microscale has significant applications in many domains, including biological processing, guiding chemical reactions, and creating structured materials, to name just a few. Recently, it has been discovered that placing pillars of different dimensions, and at different offsets, allows "sculpting" the fluid flow in microchannels. The design and placement of sequences of pillars allows a phenomenal degree of flexibility to program the flow. However, to achieve such a control it is necessary to understand how flow is affected by different input parameters.
The problem is challenging for several reasons. The search space consists of tens of thousands of points, and an individual simulation may take hundreds of core-hours, even when executed on a state-of-the-art HPC cluster. The individual simulations, although independent, are highly heterogeneous and their cost is very difficult to estimate a priori, owing to varying resolution and mesh density required for different configurations. Finally, because the non-linear solver is iterative, it may fail to converge for some combinations of input parameters, which necessitates fault-tolerance.

The goal of this project is to understand how different microchannel parameters affect fluid flow [1]. To achieve this we will explore the use of CometCloud to provide a novel user-centered federation model. [1] H. Amini, E. Sollier, M. Masaeli, et al. Engineering fluid flow using sequenced microstructures. Nature Communications, 2013. (http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n5/full/ncomms2841.html)

The outcome of this research will provide the most comprehensive data on the effect of pillars on microfluid channel flow. This has an important impact on a number of many domains, including biological processing, guiding chemical reactions, and creating structured materials. Moreover, the user-centered computational federation that will be validated in this project can be used for a large number of applications and domains.

Project Contact

Project Lead

Javier Diaz Montes (jdiaz) 

Project Manager

Javier Diaz Montes (jdiaz) 

Project Members

Ivan Rodero, Jaroslaw Zola  

Resource Requirements

Hardware Systems

• hotel (IBM iDataPlex at U Chicago)
• india (IBM iDataPlex at IU)
• sierra (IBM iDataPlex at SDSC)

 

We intend to use the FutureGrid resources to compute our the scientific problem (MPI tasks) as part of our federation.

We plan to use several systems such a India, Sierra and Hotel for several weeks.

Project Timeline

Submitted

01/01/2013 - 14:27 

Completed

05/31/2013