Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Temporal And Spatial Analysis Of Stream And Groundwater Interactions, Ryan Eugene Warden

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Water chemistry and ecology of streams are impacted by the amount of water that exchanges between the surface water system and the adjacent saturated area, called the hyporheic zone, a dynamic area of stream channel sediments, which undergoes down-welling or up-welling of stream water. The rate and volume of water exchange between the surface water and the hyporheic zone are primary controls on stream ecology, but are challenging to assess. A common approach is to model the exchange rate with a one-dimensional advection-dispersion equation that includes solute exchange with transient storage zones, which is referred to as a transient storage …

Coloring Problems, Thomas Antonio Charles Chartier

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis considers several coloring problems all of which have a combinatorial flavor. We review some results on the chromatic number of the plane, and improve a bound on the value of regressive Ramsey numbers. The main work of this thesis considers the problem of whether given any n ≥ 1; one can color Z+ in such a way that for all a ϵ Z+ the numbers a, 2a, 3a, ..., na are assigned different colors. Such colorings are referred to as satisfactory. We provide a sufficient condition for guaranteeing the existence of satisfactory colorings and analyze the …

Geochronologic And Isotopic Investigation Of The Koipato Formation, Northwestern Great Basin, Nevada: Implications For Late Permian-Early Triassic Tectonics Along The Western U.S. Cordillera, Nicholas Quentin Vetz

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The volcanics of the Early Triassic Koipato Formation of central Nevada unconformably overlie the Golconda Allochthon and, classically, this relationship has been used to define the timing of the Sonoma Orogeny as post-Middle Permian to earliest Triassic. However, the Koipato Formation represents a rather isolated magmatic succession, with other western U.S. Early Mesozoic igneous provinces determined to be younger or lacking rocks of Koipato age. This isolation, coupled with the fact that the Koipato Formation does not overlap the Golconda Allochthon, has left open two possible scenarios for its tectonic history: 1) the Koipato Formation represents the earliest, post-Sonoma Orogeny …

Designing Reliable High-Performance Storage Systems For Hpc Environments, Lucas Scott Hindman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Advances in processing capability have far outpaced advances in I/O throughput and latency. Distributed file system based storage systems help to address this performance discrepancy in high performance computing (HPC) environments; however, they can be difficult to deploy and challenging to maintain. This thesis explores the design considerations as well as the pitfalls faced when deploying high performance storage systems. It includes best practices in identifying system requirements, techniques for generating I/O profiles of applications, and recommendations for disk subsystem configuration and maintenance based upon a number of recent papers addressing latent sector and unrecoverable read errors.

Evapotranspiration In The Riparian Zone Of The Lower Boise River With Implications For Groundwater Flow, Brady Allen Johnson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Riparian zones in semi-arid regions often exhibit high rates of evapotranspiration (ET) in spite of low soil moisture content due to vegetation that is able to withdraw water from shallow aquifers. This work better defines the relationship between ET and the saturated zone by comparing the observed water table drawdown to analytically modeled drawdown in fully penetrating wells of an unconfined aquifer in response to daily ET flux. ET at the Boise Hydrogeophysical Research Site or BHRS (a riparian zone in a temperate, semi arid environment) is calculated following the approach of Batra et al. (2006) but uses site …

Spatial Distribution And Evolution Of A Seasonal Snowpack In Complex Terrain: An Evaluation Of The Snodas Modeling Product, Brian Trail Anderson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Hydrologists and water managers have been attempting to accurately estimate watershed scale snow water equivalent (SWE) for over a century. Extensive monitoring networks, remote sensing technology, and sophisticated modeling approaches have greatly improved these estimates; however, water inputs from snow in mountainous areas are still subject to considerable uncertainty due to SWE spatial variability. In an attempt to improve the understanding of physical processes and controls influencing SWE spatial variability, a field campaign to measure the spatial and temporal distribution of SWE within the Dry Creek Experimental Watershed (DCEW) was conducted during 2009 and 2010. These measurements are compared to …

Measuring The Rate Of Garnet Growth: Implications For Rb-Sr Garnet Chronology, Jessica Sousa

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Garnet growth rates have provided valuable information for understanding the rates of tectonometamorphic processes. In theory, during its growth, garnet records the decay of 87Rb within a rock matrix as steadily increasing ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr from core to rim. By measuring the Sr isotopic zoning within garnet and matrix Rb/Sr and ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr, the rate of garnet growth can be determined. To test this, we used ID-TIMS to measure Rb-Sr data for five samples from three major orogenic belts: central New England, southernmost Chile, and western Italian Alps. These new data introduce two major difficulties encountered using …

Modules Over Localized Group Rings For Groups Mapping Onto Free Groups, Nicholas Davidson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In 1964, Paul Cohn showed that if F is a finitely-generated free group, and Q a field, then all ideals in the group ring Q[F] are free as Q[F]-modules. In particular, all finitely-generated submodules of free Q[F]-modules are free. In 1990, Cynthia Hog-Angeloni reproved this theorem using techniques from geometric group theory. Leaning on Hog-Angeloni's methods, we prove an analogous statement for crossed products D * F, with D a division ring.

With this result in hand, we prove that if G = H⋊F, the semi-direct product …

Improving Data Freshness To Enhance The Quality Of Observations In Wireless Sensor Networks, Ramya Bala Ammu

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used to achieve either continuous monitoring or event-detection in the area of interest. In continuous monitoring applications, each sensor node transmits its sensed data to the sink node (base station) periodically; while in event-detection driven applications, nodes report to the sink node once an event occurs. Continuous monitoring applications require periodic refreshed data at the sink node. Data reaching the sink node after a certain threshold is not useful for processing or analysis because it is stale. Data freshness along with reliable data delivery is critical in such applications. Current protocols in this area measure …

Methods For Multilevel Parallelism On Gpu Clusters: Application To A Multigrid Accelerated Navier-Stokes Solver, Dana A. Jacobsen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is an important field in high performance computing with numerous applications. Solving problems in thermal and fluid sciences demands enormous computing resources and has been one of the primary applications used on supercomputers and large clusters. Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) with many-core architectures have emerged as general-purpose parallel computing platforms that can accelerate simulation science applications substantially. While significant speedups have been obtained with single and multiple GPUs on a single workstation, large problems require more resources. Conventional clusters of central processing units (CPUs) are now being augmented with GPUs in each compute-node to tackle …