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Project TitleModeling and Simulation of large-scale Granular Dynamics problems
SummaryThe undergraduate student intern will work with the research team at the Simulation-Based Engineering Lab (SBEL) at UW-Madison. The student will be involved in implementing Charm++ and/or MPI granular dynamics software. He/She will be responsible for developing models of practical problems that will be used to run often-encountered simulations in geomechanical tests on both shared and large distributed memory systems.
Job DescriptionThe student will work with his mentor, a professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at UW-Madison, and the team of graduate students and scientists at the Simulation-Based Engineering Lab (SBEL). He/She will become familiar and develop Chrono∷Granular, a module of Chrono, an open source physical simulation library (see http://www.projectchrono.org/chronoengine/). The student will also learn about Charm++ and use the acquired skills in implementing granular dynamics simulations. This makes the project part of a larger effort aimed at making Chrono a massively parallel computing environment for physics simulation.

Specific tasks that the student will be involved in:

1. Learning about models used in simulating the large scale granular dynamics. This will help the student become familiar with the functionality of Chrono in general, and Chrono::Granular specifically. Most importantly, this will help him/her in understanding the nature of the problem and the algorithms used to solve it. Altogether, it will make the base for moving forward and implementing the parallel solution for the problem of simulating the granular dynamics with a usage of Chrono.

2. Learning about the way the collision detection is implemented by the authors of Charm++. The student needs to understand the concepts of the collision library, develop it and demonstrate the solutions.

The Simulation-Based Engineering Lab owns and operates a multi-core, hybrid CPU/GPU, supercomputer cluster, called Euler (http://sbel.wisc.edu/Resources/Hardware/). This hardware asset is used to model and simulate complex mechanical systems. The cluster will be available for the student to use.
Conditions/QualificationsThe undergraduate must be able to work full-time (30-40 hours/week) over the summer at UW-Madison and part-time (~10 hours/week) during the 2015-16 academic year. C++ programming experience is required.
Start Date05/15/2016
End Date05/15/2017
LocationSimulation-Based Engineering Lab (http://sbel.wisc.edu/)
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1513 University Ave, Madison WI 53706
Interns
Nicholas Olsen