Purdue professor wins Department of Defense computing award

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — One of the College of Engineering’s newer professors has received a large research grant from the U.S. Department of Defense for supercomputing resources.

Jonathan Poggie, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and his team were selected for the competitive Frontier Award of supercomputer hours. The award enables science and technology research that would not be possible without extraordinary computer resources.

The awarded hours are typically utilized in very large projects which use up to 100 percent of the processors on a supercomputer and produce many terabytes of data.

Poggie is the principal investigator for a new U.S. Department of Defense high-performance computing modernization program beginning in October, entitled “Prediction of Hypersonic Laminar-Turbulent Transition through Direct Numerical Simulation.” 

The project is focused on making conventional hypersonic wind tunnels more useful for vehicle design by helping designers work through the noise and turbulence present in the tunnels and allowing them to more accurately interpret the results of the wind tunnel tests.

Better understanding of the expensive hypersonic wind tunnel tests will assist in accurately predicting the different conditions experienced in actual flight.

Collaborators Roger L. Kimmel of the Air Force Research Laboratory and Lian Duan, a professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, are working with Poggie on the project.

Financial support for the work is being provided by a grant from the Office of Naval Research.

Now one of the largest users of supercomputer resources in the nation, Poggie joined Purdue in 2015 after a long career as researcher at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. His recent computational studies have led to new insight into high-speed turbulent flow and unsteady separation that will aid the design of aerospace vehicles for national defense and space access. 

Writer: Brian L. Huchel, 765-494-2084, bhuchel@purdue.edu 

Sources: Jonathan Poggie, 765-496-0614, jpoggie@purdue.edu