CCR Computational Scientist, Shawn Matott, wins annual CASC cover art contest

As part of the NSF-sponsored ‘URGE (Undergraduate Research Group Experiences) to Compute’ program, Dr. Matott has been collaborating with talented Math majors to design cost-effective systems for safeguarding groundwater supplies from contaminated sites.  Groundwater is an important natural resource, yet many aquifers are at risk of becoming contaminated by human activities such as poor waste disposal practices, intensive agriculture, and mining operations.  The student's research uses groundwater models, simulation-based optimization and high performance computing to evaluate alternative remediation systems. The ultimate goal is to develop “best-in-class” algorithms that can reliably pinpoint the least-cost approach for a given problem. To help develop improved algorithms, Dr. Matott and his team performed numerical experiments to exhaustively map the projected costs of alternative designs.  One such “cost surface” recently won a cover art competition run by the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC).  The figure depicts a representative cost surface of alternative pump-and-treat strategies for intercepting pollutants at a contaminated site in Billings, Montana. The figure dramatically highlights the phenomena of artificial minima – valley locations that correspond to designs whose costs are only partially optimal.  The winning entry was prepared in collaboration with Adrian Levesque and Martins Innus, who are multimedia visualization specialists at UB's Center for Computational Research.