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High Performance Computing (HPC) at UH

Researcher of the Month
Professor Kwok Fai Cheung

The ENDEAVOR Project

An integrated view of engineering problems has made Prof. Cheung the ideal choice to teach the Capstone Design Class in the Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering (ORE), where he has been teaching since 1993. He also teaches Water Wave Mechanics and Coastal and Harbor Engineering. The Department offers an academic program leading to the Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in three disciplines: coastal engineering, offshore engineering, and ocean resources engineering. Prof. Cheung currently supports 19 graduate research assistants and 2 post-doctoral fellows through outside grants and contracts from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Hawaii State Civil Defense, National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program, National Science Foundation (NSF), NOAA Sea Grant, and local engineering firms. He is expecting a project from FEMA to map hurricane inundation on Hawaii coastlines for emergency response plan development.

His many projects can be grouped into three main categories; tsunami modeling, hurricane inundation modeling, and wind wave modeling. For each type, he applies the appropriate suites of models to describe the complex phenomena. Also in each case, the goal is to determine the effects of the ocean environment on coastlines, infrastructure, ship performance, or human activities. One example of his work is the ENDEAVOR project, for the Department of Defense. The goal is to develop a web-based system that enables ship performance analysis, mission planning, and coastal management with a realistically simulated ocean environment (http://oceanforecast.net/). As the figure developed from this project reflects, global wave conditions were predicted first then followed by the regional and coastal wave conditions. The computed wave spectra were applied to determine motion and steering effects of marine vehicles. This work was performed in collaboration with MHPCC, Navatek, and SAIC.

Prof. Cheung now has a 16-node Dell cluster with 128 processors in his department.

Prof. Cheung earned his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C. in 1991 and obtained his Professional Engineer (PE) licenses in B.C. and Hawaii in 1993 and 1999 respectively. Read more about his work at http://oe.ore.hawaii.edu/OE/ore_cheung.htm.