Dr. Liu Chun-ho of Department of Mechanical Engineering is one of the users who has been using our HKUSP2 supercomputer in his research work since the installation of our HKUSP2 supercomputer many years ago. He has kindly provided us his experience on how he has benefited from our HKUSP2 Supercomputer for his computation-intensive research work on Numerical Analysis of Atmospheric Boundary Layer and Pollutant Dispersion.

The Computer Centre would like to thank Dr. Liu for sharing his experience with other users on using the HKUSP2 supercomputer. We also invite other existing HKUSP2 users to write to us to share their HKUSP2 experience so that more users can benefit from our HKUSP2 Supercomputer.

Dr Liu Chun Ho got his B.Eng(Mech) degree in the University of Hong Kong. After that, he finished his PhD degree and worked as Research Associate in this University. Dr Liu had been using the SP2 supercomputer throughout his PhD study. After earning his Ph.D. degree, he continued to work in the University's Department of Mechanical Engineering as a postdoctoral Research Associate until the end of 1999. He is now working as a postdoctoral research fellow in National Center For Atmospheric Research, Colorado, USA, with the support of the Croucher Foundation, Hong Kong.

Dr. Liu Chun-Ho wrote:

Dr. Liu, Chun-Ho and his project supervisor Dr. Dennis Y. C. Leung have been working on numerical analysis of the atmospheric boundary layer and pollutant dispersion since 1993. They are particularly interested in using state-of-the-art numerical models to simulate the wind flow, temperature variation, moisture content, turbulence structure and pollutant dispersion together with the involved chemical reactions in the atmospheric boundary layer.

The sizes of the computational domain for discretizing the above problem are of several kilometres in both horizontal and vertical directions. High resolution (i.e.more accurate) calculations have to use million of nodal points for solving the problems that require tremendous computer memory and computational time.

The resources provided by traditional workstations are insufficient to perform these large-scale computations. The HKUSP2 system which is an IBM SP2 Supercomputer installed in the Computer Centre provides not only a solution method, but also an efficient approach to solve the problem. With the use of the HKUSP2 system and assistance from staff of the Computer Centre, Dr. Liu and Dr. Leung performed numerous numerical experiments about atmospheric turbulence and pollutant dispersion in different configurations. These cost-effective numerical experiments are vital to the analysis and understanding of the relationship between atmosphere, air quality and human-being in detail. Besides, their investigations and experience in using the supercomputer is beneficial to the exploitation of more efficient numerical methods in solving practical engineering problems. Such a computational intensive application would only take 2 days to get results on the HKUSP2 system when normally it would take one month using a conventional computer.

In addition to the project mentioned above, Dr. Liu and Dr. Leung are also working on other environmental related subjects using the HKUSP2 system, such as large amplitude mountain waves, turbulence and pollutant dispersion over city and coastal areas, turbulence and pollutant recirculation inside street canyon and smog and particulate physics.
 

Dr Liu Chun-ho
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Email : liuchunho@graduate.hku.hk
 

C.M. Woo
Tel: 28578632
Email: cmwoo@hkusua.hku.hk