CCL currently occupies about 700 square feet in two primary rooms of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, located on Busch Campus of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey.

Currently Available Facilities and Tools at CCL

Complete and frequently updated lists of various resources and software, for which CCL maintains active licenses, are available on the following pages:

The Computational Chemodynamics Laboratory (CCL) at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute (EOHSI) is a state-of-the-art facility for modeling and informatics of environmental and biological systems, dedicated to the development and improvement of methods for performing mechanistically-based health risk studies.

CCL supports, through modeling and data analysis, the NIEHS-funded Center for Environmental Exposures and Disease (CEED), the NIH-funded National Children's Study (NCS) Queens Vanguard Center, the environmental bioinformatics and Computational Toxicology Center (ebCTC), and the Center for Exposure and Risk Modeling (CERM). It also currently supports the Ozone Research Center, funded by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP); the Respiratory Effects of Silver and Carbon Nanomaterials (RESAC) Center, funded by NIEHS; and the Climate Change and Allergic Airway Disease (CCAAD) and the Risk Assessment for Manufactured Nanoparticles Used in Consumer Products (RAMNUC) projects, funded by USEPA.

Computer model and software development and evaluation at CCL takes place on a distributed networked computing system. The CCL network includes clusters of both multiprocessor Sun (Solaris) and Linux (Beowulf) servers (both Intel-based and AMD Opteron-based multicore servers); these are complemented by personal computers and workstations (Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems) running Network File System (NFS and SMBFS) over a local switched 100-megabit and gigabit ethernet-based LAN. The overall computing facilities at CCL span over 50 servers (several of which are multiprocessor) and over 20 workstations (with a majority of them capable of booting multiple operating systems, and optionally to be used as servers). These servers also include dedicated parallel computing, currently consisting of a 16-node cluster with 2 GB of RAM per node, a 16-core system with 64 GB RAM, a 48-core system with 128 GB RAM, and two 64-core systems with 512 GB RAM, each with several terabytes of disk storage used for large scale simulations. These computers access a total of more than 260 terabytes of internal network accessible disk space with RAID protection. The Beowulf cluster and the Opteron servers are dual bootable and can operate as a cluster of Windows workstations as needed.

The computing clusters can operate in flexible modes, either as batch processors for multiple simulations assigned by front-load balancers, or as shared memory parallel virtual machines employing the Message Passing Interface (MPI) system. The combination of server-client and cluster computing approaches utilizing multiple operating systems assures both flexibility and cost-effectiveness in relation to either employing commercial and open source software for analysis or implementing locally developed applications. This hardware structure is particularly cost-effective for performing large-scale sensitivity and uncertainty studies, data analysis, and optimization for complex modeling studies.

CCL also employs resources for graphics and visualization capabilities through several Sun workstations (components of the clusters), Mac OS X workstations, and multiple dual bootable Intel workstations. Several of the CCL researchers also use high-end, dual bootable laptops with wireless connectivity and secure, remote access. Various peripherals, including multipurpose copier/printer/scanner machines and Digital Linear Tape (DLT) libraries, complement the server and workstation network and provide support and interconversion capabilities for a wide range of operating systems, data types and formats.

The organization of the computational resources at CCL is based on the rationale of using the right tool for the task, as well as making the tools function robustly in a multitude of computing environments such as free-standing hardware (the UltraServers and individual workstations) and grid computing environments (the Beowulf Linux clusters and Windows clusters). The software tools and databases developed at CCL are tested on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X, and as needed, on mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, and Android devices), and are typically developed with cross-platform compatibility as one of the primary goals (in addition to correctness, robustness, efficiency, and ease of use via web-based interfaces whenever possible). All computer model development work as well as documentation and reporting follow CCL policies that focus on standardized storage, version control and accessing of documentation and computer code (via RCS and CVS version control systems, which are also usable via CCL's secure intranet), standardized evaluation procedures for existing tools and methods (periodic application of standard test cases, and Regression and Smoke tests), and standardized reporting and tracking of feature requests, issues and bugs in the computational tools developed (via web-based interfaces using state-of-the-art open source tools for bug tracking and reporting).

CCL Software Facilities
To assure usage of state-of-the-art approaches for model development and data analysis, CCL maintains both open source tools and locally active licenses for a wide range of commercial software, including tools for Relational Database Development and Management (including Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS Access, FileMaker Pro etc.), Geographic Information Systems analysis (including ArcGIS, ArcView, ArcInfo, GRASS, RAMAS GIS, PostGIS, Google Earth Professional, etc.), numerical and analytical model coding (including Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, ACSL, MathCad, Octave, etc., as well as Fortran, C/C++, .Net, Perl, Java, and Titamium development environments), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) (including Ansys Fluent, CFX, Phoenics, MultiPhysics, STAR-CD, etc.), data visualization (including TecPlot, NCAR Graphics, EVS Pro, IBM OpenDX, GGobi, etc.), statistical analysis and data mining (including S-Plus, SAS, SYSTAT, R, etc.), visual model development (including Rational Rose, Stella, Simul8, SimuLink, etc.), engineering design and technical illustration (including AutoCad, Visio Professional, Design Workshop, 3D Studio Viz), image processing (including GIMP, Photoshop, Matlab Image Processing, Image Analysis for ArcView, etc.), and website and web-based application development (including Dreamweaver, ArcIMS, Apache-based software, etc.).

CCL Environmental and Biological Model Repository
CCL maintains up-to-date versions of a wide range of environmental and biological modeling packages for both atmospheric, multimedia, and physiological applications. Examples of comprehensive models available at CCL are:

Environmental and Biological Databases and Supplemental Resources
Following is an example subset of the numerous extant databases currently linked with the MENTOR and PRoTEGE systems for CCL's Exposure Information Systems (EXIS):

Chemical Specific Data

Exposure Factor Data

Health Outcome Data