A quick search of past posts verifies that, yes, this is the first pairie-related post here in nearly three thousand news posts. Sure, its a niche record, but I’m counting it.
From SiCortex today
Researchers at the University of Houston and the University of Rennes1 are leveraging several SiCortex high-productivity computing (HPC) systems at the Houston site to drive a research project aimed at protecting the ecology of prairial systems.
…The ViP project has already far exceeded the size of any standard ecological simulation today. In phase one of the project, researchers modeled individual plant space colonization through clonal reproduction to make initial hypotheses about the complex relationships that exist among plant types. More than 22 million simulations later, the data revealed that not one single, but a few different strategies should be leveraged to achieve the best growth. The second phase of the project will run thousands of combinations of plant types in a single master simulation over an entire season, aiming to identify the optimal combinations for long-term sustainability for a prairial system under a variety of conditions.
Researchers on the project are making use of an SC648, the third SiCortex system installed at the U of Houston.