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Model testing at the Offshore Technology Research Center.
The Ocean Engineering Program participates in several research centers and laboratories associated with Texas A&M University
- Center for Dredging Studies
- Offshore Technology Research Center
- Haynes Coastal Engineering Laboratory
We are also the home to several other significant research facilities
High-Powered Computer Resources
Researchers in the Ocean Engineering Program maintain a large computational cluster of about 150 processors. These resources are dedicated; only faculty and students in the Program have access to these computers. The cluster is used primarily for the development of parallel simulation tools, with a heavy focus on computational fluid dynamics. Example applications include hurricane surge inundation, estimation of nearshore wave and currents, wave impact on structures such as breakwaters, wave-ship interaction, and tsunami flooding predictions.
The need for such large computational resources arises from the fact that many of the issues facing ocean engineers are inherently "multi-scale." For example, the storm surge created by a hurricane is generated by strong winds blowing over ocean basins that may be 100's of miles wide. Yet, the local surge on a coastline is dependent on features that have scales of a few feet or less; encompassing scales across 5 orders of magnitude. To simulate processes through these scales, sophisticated numerical models run on parallel computer architecture are needed.
The computer cluster is housed in the Civil Engineering Department server room. The processors in the cluster are primarily AMD Opteron's running Linux, connected via gigabit network. The combined storage space of the cluster exceeds 20 Terabytes. Since this cluster was initiated in 2004, over 100 years of computer processor time have been utilized.