Sanjiv Kumar, a PhD Student working with Professor Venkatesh Merwade in the Hydraulics and Hydrology area of the School of Civil Engineering recently won the first prize in Graduate Student Research Competition at TeraGrid ‘08 Conference, held in Las Vegas from June 9 – 13, 2008. His poster titled “Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Data and Modeling” demonstrated the most efficient and justifiable use of the greatest computational power (TeraGrid) for scientific investigation in hydrology. Other co-authors on the poster include Dr. Carol Song and Lan Zhao from Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advance Computing.

TeraGrid is a public domain computational infrastructure that integrates computing resources from eleven partner institutions (including Purdue) in the United States to provide 750 teraflops of computing capability and more than 30 petabytes of online and archival data storage, with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance network. Sanjiv’s research using TeraGrid involved modeling of 26 hydrologic scenarios in St. Joseph River Watershed in northern Indiana to investigate modeling uncertainty in understanding of watershed hydrology. This study which would have taken more than a year on a regular desktop computer was accomplished in less than two weeks using TeraGrid resources. Sanjiv’s research is a part of a larger ongoing collaborative project at Purdue titled “Cyberinfrastructure for End-to-End Environmental Explorations (C4E4)” funded by the National Science Foundation. For more information on the C4E4 project, send e-mail to c4e4@purdue.edu.