Luckily, two engineers at GE Research in Niskayuna who are working on renewable energy technologies just got their hands on the U.S. government's most powerful supercomputer to aid them in their work. GE Research is the main research lab of General Electric Co.
The two engineers, Jing Li and Michal Osusky, are two of 20 scientists from around the country who have been awarded access to do their research on the Department of Energy's Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The Summit supercomputer, which was built for the government by IBM, can do 200 quadrillion calculations per second, making it the second-fastest supercomputer in the world.
Li will be using Summit to study how so-called coastal low-level jets — a type of high-powered but unpredictable wind pattern that occurs in coastal areas — interact with offshore wind turbines.
Osusky's work on Summit will include trying to develop more perfect computer models that predict how air flows through turbines used in jet engines and for power generation.
Such a model would allow for a "virtual" wind tunnel that would allow researchers to more quickly test and develop new turbine designs.
"These simulations would provide unprecedented insight into what's happening in these complex machines, way beyond what is possible through today's experimental tests," Osusky said. "The hope is we can utilize a platform like this to accelerate the discovery and validation process for cleaner, more efficient engine designs that further promote our decarbonization goals."
GE Research also said Rick Arthur, senior director of computational methods research, was named to the DOE's Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Council, which provides guidance to the DOE on its research programs using supercomputing power.
The DOE is already getting ready for the launch of its latest supercomputer called Frontier that is being made by Cray. Frontier is expected to be 50 times faster than the current generation of supercomputers. Such a computer can perform what is known as "exascale" computing because it can perform a quintillion calculations a second.
Arthur says that supercomputers are to renewable energy development as telescopes are to astronomy.
© 2021 the Times Union (Albany, N.Y.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
