Other Information

  • UCF is a member of SURAgrid
  • STOKES is funded in part by the U.S. ARMY RDECOM (Research, Development and Engineering Command).
If you have any questions, please contact the systems administrator:
Sergio Tafur
Phone: 407-882-0206
Email: tafur@physics.ucf.edu

Current Research

Research on Stokes covers a wide variety of areas, including Engineering, Modeling and Simulation, Astronomy, Biology, and NanoScience. All of these areas benefit from Stokes by allowing users to submit jobs and recieve data in a timely manner that would not be possible on conventional personal computers.

General Research

Research activities that utilize the Stokes cluster include:
  • OneSAF
    • Currently a typical large OneSAF scenario includes 22 Simcores supporting 30K entities, with 2K entities at medium resolution, 10K at low resolution and the rest at ultra low resolution. Stokes is researching running additional Simcores on different processors/nodes while exploring the distribution of a Simcore instance over multiple processors.

  • Interactive MMOG
    • Researchers are investigating strategies for overlaying Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) onto the STOKES cluster. Although the project is still in the early stages, there are many different techniques that can be used to accomplish their goal, including mapping an MMOG geographically, exercise-based or load-based. Also, the research team is investigating the impact of computing architectures on implementation.

  • Visualization
    • VirtualGL and TurboVNC are being utilized to allow users to remotely access and run 3-D applications on Stokes. VirtualGL and TurboVNC can enable users to experience frame rates of up to 900 fps with any Java enabled device.

Other Research

  • PhD Candidate Craig Finch is developing a multiscale simulation of the adsorption of proteins to engineered surfaces in microfluidic channels. He is linking a continuum computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation with a microscale Brownian Dynamics (BD) simulation. Brownian Dynamics is a stochastic simulation method, so multiple runs are performed and statistics must be used to analyze the results. Stokes allows him to run multiple simulations in parallel, greatly reducing the time needed to produce useful data.

  • Professor Joseph Harrington at UCF we will be using Stokes to analyze exoplanetary secondary eclipse data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. A Markov-Chain Monte Carlo analyses will be run on Stokes to find model parameters and their errors. These provide measurements of planetary thermal emission and constraints on orbital parameters like eccentricity.

  • Marisol Alcantara Ortigoza, who is part of Prof. Rahman's research group is using Stokes to study the electronic, magnetic, and catalytic properties of D5h segregated Au_{27}Fe_7 nanoparticle in the framework of the density functional theory by using the Vienna ab-initio package simulation(VASP).

  • Dan DeBlasio's research is currently on the multiple alignment of rRNA sequences. He uses the given sequence folding structure of input RNA to help align multiple sequences. DeBlasio's research is the first of its kind to do a multiple alignment using structure. Stokes allows for multiple jobs to run at once, and is very valuable due to the high amount of memory needed to run these sequences.