Posted on August 13, 2020
The Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the continental United States, weaves its way south from Maryland, collecting waters from West Virginia, Delaware, DC, Pennsylvania and New York along the way.
Like many major ecosystems and watersheds, the Chesapeake Bay is being substantially changed by ongoing environmental crises. Now, researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) are using supercomputing power to understand these changes, lending insight into the Chesapeake Bay as well as changes in broader coastal waters.
Specifically, the researchers – led by Pierre St-Laurent, a research scientist at VIMS – simulated the effects of historical increases in fertilizer concentrations in the bay, as well as the effects of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, over a period of about a hundred years (from the early 1900s to the early 2000s). To run these simulations, the research team used the Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Comprising 1,944 Intel Haswell-based compute nodes and 72 Nvidia-based GPU nodes, Comet delivers 2.76 peak petaflops.
“Without Comet, we would have had to scale down our experiments drastically, affecting the scientific scope of the study and leaving important questions unanswered,” St-Laurent told SDSC’s Kimberly Mann Bruch in an interview. “Because our research spanned two periods of time covering the early 1900s to the early 2000s, our computational requirement vastly exceeded the resources available at our local research center, but they were well within the computing capacities at SDSC.”
The simulations found that those changes in emissions and fertilizers had effectively forced the estuary to develop stronger carbon sequestration abilities — a trend that they say is “likely to continue in the decades to come.” The concentrations of chemicals from fertilizers, on the other hand, they expect to wane in the wake of fading nitrogen-driven farming activity.
Source: coastalnewstoday
