History
The Advanced Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory was launched at LSU in 1988 as a result of joint grant between Martin Marietta, IBM and LSU. Since then, Boyd Professor George Voyiadjis and his research group have used the lab's advanced computational facilities to study metal forming, manufacturing processes, evolution of texture and damage in advanced composite materials. Dr. Voyiadjis has secured in excess of $4 M in grants from NSF, DOD, AFOSR, DOTD, NASA, and Industry in order to study the material behavior and damage mechanisms in materials.
The primary research area is in damage of metals, metal matrix composites, and ceramics with emphasis on the numerical simulation of the material behavior. Research activities of particular interest encompass: macro-micro mechanical modeling, quantification of crack densities, inelastic behavior, thermal effects, interfaces, damage failure, and fracture.
The CSM laboratory has a network of Pentium-based PC's as well as Silicon Graphics and Digital Unix workstations. In addition the laboratory also has a Microways Beowulf type distributed computing system which consists of a cluster of 16 node dual processor Athlon cluster for a total of 32 CPU's. Each node of the cluster has 256 MB of DDR SDRAM and 20 GB Ultra ATA 100 disk. This system is primarily used as a compute engine and the results of the model simulations are visualized on a Silicon Graphics Onyx 3200 system. The cluster and the visualization platform are tightly integrated using a Gigabit ethernet interconnect.
CSM Lab is directly connected to 2.207-TeraFlop supercomputer, Supermike. The general-purpose, parallel supercomputer, christened Supermike in honor of the University's Bengal mascot, is the second largest computer in the academic world and the 11th fastest in the world. The Beowulf-class supercomputer enhances the high-performance-computing resources that are available to Louisiana's students and academic researchers in various subfields of information technology. LSUs supercomputer is composed of 1,024 Xeon DP processors that are tightly coupled through Myricom's myrinet network, with each processor containing four Intel Pentium 4 processors. The system contains 1 Terabyte of RAM and more than 40 Terabytes of disk storage.