Galileo Alliance: high performance computing for solving complex problems related to oil and gas exploitation in Brazil
Professor Alvaro Coutinho, Director, High Performance Computing Center, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil

February 12th 2010
10:30 am
Seminar Room, LIRMM

Abstract
Recently it was announced huge oil and gas discoveries in Brazil, the world's biggest in the last 30 years, with reserves of 33 billions of barrels of oil. Reserves are located offshore Brazil in ultra-deep waters (>2,000 m) below a salt layer, 4,000 m below the sea bottom. Technical challenges for exploration and production are immense. It is recognized that computer simulation will play a major role to address these challenges. There is a need to produce new simulation software for the multiscale/multiphysics problems related to the several engineering disciplines involved and underlying enabling technologies and HPC infrastructure.
To foster these developments, Petrobras organized an Alliance of five Universities in Brazil to do research and development in these topics and to deploy a network of high performance computers. At the time of this talk, Galileo has three high-performance computers installed, and the one located at the High Performance Computing Center at the Graduate School of Engineering, The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro is ranked #76 in the November 2009 TOP500 list. In this talk I will review the conception of Galileo Alliance, the HPC infrastructure and topics related to the development of applications in such
machines. Particularly I will share our experience in designing finite element simulators for complex fluid-structure interaction problems found in offshore hydrodynamics, the transport and deposition of sand by density currents, with applications to the study of turbidite deposits, especially the frontal splays and lateral wedges. Further topics of interest in simulation include turbulence modeling with variational multiscale methods and discrete element methods. I will also briefly discuss the computational infrastructure to integrate such wide variety of applications.

Short bio
Professor Alvaro Coutinho is the Director of the High Performance Computing Center, Professor, at The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil. He has been doing in high performance computing for computational science since 1984, advising 17 Ph.D. theses. He is strongly involved in industrial projects. He vas the recipient of the IBM Faculty Partnership Award in 2001 and of the Giulio Massarani Academic Award, COPPE, 2007 He has published more than 70 Journal papers and 250 Conference papers.