Dr. Tyler presented a talk on their approach to solving several high performance computer research problems. Dr. Tyler, who is a computer scientist, collaborated with researchers from other disciplines including physicists, petroleum, mechanical, electrical and chemical engineers to attack these real world problems. Dr. Tyler described the platform for research as being a parallel cluster using MPI as the programming tool. He then described in detailed several of the problems.

He first presented information on a problem involving an accurate simulation of the multiphase flow in porous media. This problem required assistance from petroleum engineers and is called the Herbert Experiment. They were able to use a simulator provided by the Department of Energy that simulates a well. Dr. Tyler showed how they used a dynamic adaptive 2D and 3D Finite Element grid to simulate the well.

The Eugene Island Simulation problem involved works being conducted by the Corps of Engineers and the handling of hazardous materials due to dreading. The Corps have been dreading around a dam at the sight in the Chicago area and dumping the waste material on the other side of the dam. If the material is immediately induced back into the water, it will be toxic to the environment and kill the inhabitants. When the material is dumped on the other side of the dam, they discovered that small amounts of the material seeps through the dam, which surprisingly turns out to be healthy for the environment when, introduced in small amounts. Dr. Tyler's team is simulating the confined disposal facility (CDF) flow through the dam with a 3D Finite Element Method (FEM). According to Dr. Tyler, most existing solutions using FEM are using 2D FEM. He then demonstrated the problems that you have with 3D FEM and talked about their methods of overcoming the problems. 3-D FEM is an area open for research.

Dr. Tyler concluded his talk by presenting material from their research in image compression for medical image storage and telemedicine. He demonstrated this research by showing views of human brains which all have tumors. He then showed how they are using enhanced LZ77 algorithms for images to compress the images and produce a compression set of similar images. Dr. Tyler expressed the importance of the expertise developed by working with and interdisciplinary team and encouraged further collaboration between different disciplines