Imagine simulating a virtual tornado and charting its finest details in 10-meter increments. Now take into account the various distances the tornado travels, sometimes over the rare 50-mile mark. Now add wind, surface friction and other weather conditions before running the simulation. And you’ve got a perfect problem for the Blue Waters supercomputer to solve.

Tornado reproductions have been done for some time, but never as precise as what a University professor and other researchers plan on doing next month with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ prized possession.

When researchers simulate tornados, or even thunderstorms on a large scale, large datasets can show details about a tornado’s inner workings, such as its formation, but they could get the “right answer for the wrong reason,” said atmospheric sciences professor Brian Jewett, whose group will be among the first to officially use Blue Waters, as it begins its five-year production stage.

This is why a supercomputer of this magnitude is needed: to answer questions like “What’s going on in the early stages in the formation of a tornado?” or “What makes it possible for a tornado to sustain itself or endure for a long period of time?”

“You find the solution at every one of those cross points of your screen and the finer you can make (the grid), the more resolution, the more detail you can see in that simulation — so that scale has not been done,” Jewett said.

Blue Waters has been fully operational for a few months, but NCSA staffers have been working out glitches during what they call a “friendly-user period.” Now they’ll start charging professors for their use — not in terms of money, but in time allocated, said NCSA spokeswoman Trish Barker.

“It’s an interesting problem because once you get a block of time, then it’s like, ‘Do you spend most of that time in one simulation and hope everything goes well? Or do you budget for several, which is pretty much the way science goes,’” Jewett said.

This is why his colleague, Central Michigan University professor Leigh Orf, has been testing possible models and various set weather conditions on a smaller-scaled supercomputer named Kraken, located at the University of Tennessee.

Jewett’s group earned time to use the supercomputer through a nationwide-allocation process with the National Science Foundation.

But University faculty members can also try another route: through a special Blue Waters committee, which comprises top faculty members across scientific and engineering disciplines. Proposals for the first round of allocation through the Illinois process were due last Friday, and the aforementioned group is reviewing them, especially looking to see if the research will take advantage of Blue Waters’ powerful Cray Inc. processors.

Barker said if researchers have to work with a small amount of data, there are other options available, such as the University’s shared computing cluster, located at the Advanced Computation Building.

“We’ve gotten quite a few proposals already and certainly quite a bit of interest,” said computer science professor Bill Gropp, a member of the allocation committee.

The NSF will presumably use an annual process, Gropp said, to allocate time for use of the supercomputer over the next five years, the time period in which the NSF is expected to cover the operating costs, though no official grant has been awarded to the University yet. Meanwhile, Illinois will use a different system, reviewing proposals three times a year, at least in the beginning.

But after the five years, it’s unclear what will happen. Barker said it is possible that the NSF extends the operational period through a grant or upgrades to the supercomputer. If that doesn’t happen, the hardware becomes property of the University, which gets to decide what to do with the processors.

“I don’t know if the University would just want to operate it without any sort of grant funding because that could be fairly expensive to do,” Barker said, referring to the high operational costs.

“In the past, some of the things we’ve been able to do is break up a supercomputer into smaller pieces and maybe we would continue to run some of it here and maybe another research entity on campus will want some. Maybe we’ll even share it with another state organization or state university,” Barker said.

But for now, Jewett and his team will soon be on the clock.

Darshan can be reached at [email protected] and@drshnpatel.