Central to EPA's mission are its Grand Challenges in air and water pollution management and in ecological assessment. The complex nature of these Grand Challenge problems demands use of the most comprehensive and integrated computational assessment tools available. By the mid-1990s, the achievement of EPA's HPCC Program goals will provide more reliable and useful tools to develop improved national pollution control and prevention strategies involving billions of dollars in control costs.
EPA has three main goals for its HPCC Program activities:
EPA participates in the NREN, ASTA, IITA, and BRHR components of the HPCC Program as follows.
EPA will expand Internet connectivity to a critical mass of environmental problem-solving groups at the Federal, state, and industrial levels and to environmental Grand Challenge research teams, enabling distributed computing approaches for linking complex ecological models or multimedia environmental models. EPA is establishing a research network to support geographically distributed collaborative development of prototype environmental assessment frameworks using a distributed, heterogeneous computing environment that includes massively parallel components and distributed data access. EPA will also provide environmental applications software for use in performance and reliability testing of Internet technology.
EPA is integrating advanced environmental assessment tools into distributed, heterogeneous computing environments. A major focus is on the development of parallel algorithms for atmospheric chemistry, transport, and molecular models to enable more effective study of multipollutant air quality issues, the impact of man-made chemicals on the environment, and the relationship between air and water pollution. In the latter case, the linkage of distinct air and water models will enhance the knowledge of complex interactions of pollutants crossing media boundaries, enable integrated assessment of pollutant impacts, and form the foundation for further integration with ecological process models. Such work will ensure that the interaction of multiple pollutants in several media (such as air and water) are considered when assessing pollutant abatement strategies. These assessments are not feasible without HPCC technology.
Environmental scientists and regulatory analysts lack adequate assessment tools because computational complexities and slow response time inhibit effective and extensive use of the most advanced environmental assessment tools. Development of a user friendly framework that puts the power of HPCC technology and advanced multipollutant environmental models directly in the hands of Federal, state, and industry groups charged with solving environmental pollution problems is a primary EPA goal.
Researchers evaluate molecular properties of carcinogens from pollution sources. The image shows electric field vectors for benzopyrene.
EPA, in concert with NASA and NOAA efforts to disseminate environmental information, proposes to expand public access to a variety of environmental databases, such as ecological measurements, air and water quality model predictions, and population exposure to pollutants. Development of intelligent user interfaces for interactive browsing, retrieval, analysis, and on-line multimedia tutorials for inexperienced users will facilitate routine use of environmental models for regulatory analysis and environmental education. In addition to these access and training systems, EPA proposes to support curriculum development for environmental education for grades 9-12 as well as university undergraduate and graduate programs.
EPA will develop and evaluate methods and materials for training Federal, state, and industrial users of advanced environmental assessment tools.
It has initiated a program to train analysts who support environmental decision making in advanced computing technology. The scope of this program ranges from making it as easy as possible to use the models to developing interactive software for on-line training.
EPA also sponsors fellowships, graduate student programs, and high school computational science programs to develop interdisciplinary skills required for air and water quality modeling.
Working with the North Carolina Supercomputing Center and several universities, EPA has initiated a Grand Challenge air quality management project in which a user friendly, multipollutant, multiscale air quality modeling system is being developed for modeling research, evaluation, and regulatory assessment.
The first prototype of the system will address regional and urban- scale ozone and regional acid deposition issues using generic scalable algorithms for key physical and chemical processes, and advanced technology for data management, interprocess communications, analyses, and visualization.
EPA has also begun to evaluate the performance of both low and high end massively parallel computers on atmospheric chemistry and transport algorithms and molecular modeling codes critical in environmental assessment. The Regional Oxidant Model has been ported to a 1,000 processor MasPar for benchmarking. Molecular mechanics and dynamics algorithms are also being evaluated on a 32-node Kendall Square Research KSR-1 and an Intel iPSC/860 at the National Institutes of Health. A variety of partial differential equation solvers are also being implemented for performance evaluation on both the MasPar and KSR machines.
To foster communication among scientists currently performing molecular modeling research on highly parallel machines, EPA and the Office of Naval Research jointly sponsored the "Molecular Modeling on Parallel Computers" workshop session at the 1993 Sanibel Symposium.
Regional Acid Deposition Model predictions of nitric acid over the eastern U.S.
A multimedia project has been initiated by porting three single- medium (or single-disciplinary) models to supercomputers Ð specifically a comprehensive regional air quality model, a watershed- water quality model, and a three-dimensional, bay hydrologic-water quality model. These models are used to address the nitrogen eutrophication of Chesapeake Bay Ð an environmental problem involving two major pollutant pathways of major concern to the Nation.
The three models have been ported to a Cray Y-MP, and the air quality model has been optimized there. Current research focuses on linking these models together when there is only minor interaction among the different media, thereby maintaining the full disciplinary complexity of known and tested individual models while demonstrating the added benefit of multimedia modeling for environmental decision making.
Three-dimensional rendition of salinity in Chesapeake Bay.
As computer capability increases, interaction among the different media and synergisms involving scores of pollutants are being introduced into environmental models. As a result, these models are becoming increasingly complex. Visualization groups supported by EPA's HPCC Program have developed high-quality videos of a regional acidic deposition model and an air quality model, demonstrating the power that visualization has to open up the workings of these models to both scientists and non-scientists.
This effort was recently expanded as visualization experts began working with water quality scientists to display the output of increasingly complex sediment transport water quality models. As part of these efforts, a new volume-rendering algorithm has greatly enhanced the realism of the three-dimensional model data, and more visualization algorithms are under development.
EPA established a 100 Mb/s (FDDI) research network and has provided T1 connectivity to the Environmental Research Center in Georgia and to the Chesapeake Bay Office in Maryland. This connectivity provides the bandwidth needed to satisfy EPA's heterogeneous computing, data management, and collaborative visualization requirements. In FY 1994 EPA will establish a T3 Internet interconnect to EPA's National Environmental Supercomputer Center.
EPA is funding the establishment of a prototype training center and an on-site training program for Federal, state, and industrial personnel, initially to support air quality regulatory decision-making policies. Hands-on training with state-of-the-art environmental assessment techniques will foster competency in high performance computing; users will observe the increasing speed, accuracy, scope, and improved management of environmental assessments available through high performance computing.
EPA is evaluating the usefulness of multimedia electronic tutor and help approaches, and collaborative computing and visualization to provide expert advice to remote locations. A prototype interactive analysis and visualization system for a workstation environment has been developed to support regulatory decision making at the state level. It uses the Urban Airshed photochemical model and the Applications Visualization System (AVS) software. The pilot user group, the North Carolina Department of Environment, Health, and Natural Resources, accesses the North Carolina Supercomputing Center at Research Triangle Park via a newly established T1 link. In FY 1994 the pilot program will be extended to additional Federal, state, and industrial environmental organizations.
Ozone concentrations seen through an AVS interface.
EPA's HPCC Program helps support EarthVision, EPA's computational science educational program for high school students and teachers. Students prepare proposals during Saturday tutorials at EPA's National Environmental Supercomputing Center in Bay City, Michigan. Teams are selected to participate in a three-week summer educational program and to conduct environmental research using scientific workstations and EPA's supercomputer during the academic year.
Getting user feedback on a prototype user interface as part of EPA's technology transfer pilot projects.