Research

We believe in open education and open science

Research Overview

Our research interests involve studying water and elemental cycles within coupled human and natural systems across varying temporal and spatial scales using both data science (big data) and case study (small data) approaches. In our research, we develop and blend field-based, laboratory-based, and data-driven tools.

Interested visitors and prospective group members can reach out to Prof. Wen for details of on-going and upcoming projects.

Figure 1: This thematic image is illustrated by MENG GRAPHICS LLC. Copyright © 2024 Tao Wen. All Rights Reserved.

Research Project Highlights

Facilities

Geochemical Instrumentation

  • Instrumentation in the WEN Group
    • Incoming instruments (more details to come soon in Fall 2024): Thermo Fisher Helix SFT and Argus VI mass spectrometers
    • Perkin Elmer Avio 200 Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES)
    • Picarro L2130-i Water Isotope Analyzer, with autosampler
    • Milli-Q IQ 7005 Ultrapure Water System
  • Other Labs and Instruments in Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Syracuse University
  • Other Labs at Syracuse University and Neighboring SUNY ESF
    • Center for Environmental Systems Engineering (CESE) at Syracuse University: The CESE laboratories occupy the 4th floor of Link Hall, which is centrally located on the Syracuse University campus. The accommodations are newly constructed and comprise of 22,000 square feet, including core laboratories and individual faculty laboratories. The core laboratories include a microbiology, soil, 3 analytical, water, acid wash, trace metals and state of the art Class 10,000 clean room. In addition, there is a radioactive isotope laboratory, dark room, 3 constant temperature rooms, cold room, computer lab for students equipped with personal computers and printers, and a teaching laboratory. The facilities have been designed with versatility required for interdisciplinary research.
    • Analytical and Technical Services (A&TS) at SUNY ESF: A&TS has developed an extensive portfolio of chemical analysis methods and capabilities in computer and instrument repair, electronic design and chemical stockroom services to complement the academic activities of the ESF community. Provided services include nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometry, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GS/MS), liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS), instrument and equipment repair and fabrication, inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES), chemical and laboratory apparatus stockroom, and polymer rheology and mechanical properties.

Research Computing Resources

  • Multiple high performance workstations for the WEN group use only
  • Data Centers: Syracuse University host a state-of-the-art data center, including 6,000 square feet of floor space and 450 kilowatts of power and cooling. It is now the main center for production computing resources, marrying research and administrative computing interests. The internal data center network is a mix of 10 and 40 Gigabit connectivity, with redundant connections to all hosts and network components whenever possible. The data center supports a robust virtual private cloud where 98% of campus servers have been consolidated. The data center is connected to the campus network and secondary data center via two bundles of geographically diverse, 144 strand fiber paths. This can be and has been used to provide direct connectivity between a researcher’s campus building and the hosted area in the primary data center.
  • Academic Virtual Hosting Environment (AVHE): The Academic Virtual Hosting Environment (AVHE) provides a virtual computing cloud to the Syracuse University research community, lowering the bar of entry for small to medium sized research efforts. The AVHE platform provides two Petabytes of storage, 1000 cores, and 25TB of memory for research use. The AVHE uses virtualization to provide flexibility and hardware sharing to allow multiple researchers to operate on an underlying server and storage infrastructure.  This lower bar of entry and flexibility provides an environment that supports both traditional and non-traditional computational research.  The AVHE supports Windows and Linux operating systems with a dynamic resource allocation model for easy scaling and configuration. Beyond supporting individual workloads, another use case for the AVHE is building small to medium sized virtualized research computing clusters, reducing the need for researchers to build and maintain small physical clusters. The AVHE utilizes the abilities of virtualization to provide high availability, which automatically migrates workload to alternate resources in the case of physical server failure.  Backup services within the AVHE are a standard service provided to researchers.
  • Crush: Crush is a medium scale virtualized research cloud. It is designed to be allocated for compute intensive work and to be used in tandem with the AVHE where the data and work scheduling infrastructure are maintained. A primary use case for Crush is the provisioning of a “cluster within a cluster” providing access to dedicated, customized compute nodes for high-performance and high-throughput computing. Nodes within Crush provide a diverse set of configurations including high density processing power, high speed disk I/O, and high-speed networking. Currently Crush consists of 25,000 cores and 150 Terabytes of memory.