December 18, 2018
The OFFshore ITRH was awarded 12 million core hours from the 2019 Pawsey supercomputer allocation scheme in order to crunch the numbers on the “Further investigation on the hydrodynamics of offshore floating facilities using numerical modelling” project. This project combines fluid mechanics, oceanography and statistics in order to focus on a range of areas within the field of offshore engineering. Applications were assessed against the following criteria: quality and innovation, investigators involved, benefit and impact of the work and its suitability and scalability of analysis.
This is a big win for the OFFshore ITRH as access to supercomputer hours is highly competitive. The awarded core hours for 2019 far exceeds our allocation in both 2017 and 2018.
This project is a key component of the OFFshore ITRH initiative with much of the high performance computing being led by two Early Career Researchers: Lifen Chen and Matt Rayson. Numerous other OFFshore ITRH members and industry participants will provide co-supervision of the five PhD students who will utilize the resource.
The awarded supercomputer hours will allow for further investigation of the interactions between ocean processes and floating facilities by using advanced numerical modelling. In particular, the team will look at the occurrence and consequence of potentially hazardous hydrodynamic loads on offshore floating facilities, resulting from extreme currents, surface and internal waves. Specific applications include predictions of peak ocean currents including the effect of internal solitons, the fatigue life of water intake risers, side by side vessel response, and the magnitide of greenwater loading on FPSOs during storm events.
Well done Lifen, Matt and the whole project team!