Frontera Fellowship Goes to ME PhD Student

ME PhD candidate Hongyuan Zhang is one of four fellows chosen across the U.S. to compute on the most powerful academic supercomputer in the world. The Frontera Computational Science Fellowship, administered by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, provides a year-long opportunity for talented graduate students to use TACC's supercomputer alongside leading experts. Only four students are selected in the U.S. per year from all STEM fields.

Zhang is a PhD student in the Computational Reactive Flow & Energy Lab (CRFEL), advised by ME Assistant Professor Suo Yang. His research focuses on compressible flows simulation, combustion modeling using machine learning, and high-performance computing. The Frontera Fellowship provides Zhang access to a rare resource and stands to provide a significant benefit to his work. "The simulation of combustion requires a lot of computing resources," said Zhang. "Now, I can only conduct relatively small-scale simulations with the resources I can access. The Frontera Fellowship will provide sufficient computing resources. Moreover, it gives me access to the latest tools and trends in advanced computing. I can bring these new technologies into the field of computational fluid dynamics."