Jenness highlights importance of HPC resources in biomass research at recent HPC Symposium Series presentation

Presenter: Post-Doctoral Fellow Glen Jenness

Jenness introduced attendees to the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI)—a project that brings together individuals and research groups with different skill sets from institutions across the country to build a collaborative team. The goal of this multidisciplinary team is to tackle the problem of using biomass to generate renewable fuels and value-added chemicals. According to Jenness 30% of U.S. transportation fuels and 25% of organic chemicals can be produced from non-food-based biomass.

In his presentation, Jenness discussed the problems faced by the team, namely, solving chemical reactivity. The team spends much of its time calculating the hundreds of thousands of rate constants for various chemical reactions. The intention of creating these chemical reactions is to produce the precursor compounds for fuels, plastics, and other materials.

Jenness also talked about the various software tools that the group uses to solve for the rate constant in molecular-level reaction networks. Having access to HPC resources, including UD’s Farber community cluster, is critically important when making massive and complex calculations. He also noted that using Farber helped the research group complete their computations 50% faster than originally projected, computing some results faster than had been possible with the Edison cluster at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

The session concluded with an open discussion about the group’s research, the steep learning curve for many of the software packages required to do HPC-based research, the IT Research Computing Team’s recent UNIX courses, and other topics that UD researchers would like taught, including programming languages like Python.