Basic Research
Basic Research
On July 31, the ESS Project sent forth the eighth graduating class of the NASA Summer School for High Performance Computational Earth and Space Sciences. The Summer School, which is held annually the last three weeks of July, was held July 13-31 at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The Class of '98 consisted of 16 Earth and space science graduate students who had been selected on a competitive basis from a pool of applicants.
The Summer School is an intensive 3-week course in modern numerical algorithms for fluid and particle simulations, and the implementation of these algorithms on massively parallel computer architectures, targeting the Earth and space sciences. Students are Earth and space science Ph.D. candidates in U.S. universities who have passed their qualifiers and for whose research the curriculum is appropriate. The course is approximately one-half lectures and one-half hands-on training on massively parallel computers, e.g., GSFC's 1,024-processor CRAY T3E. The goal of the course is to help train the next generation of Earth and space computational scientists in the use of modern algorithms and hardware.
The Class of '98 was as follows:
Jason P. Aufdenberg - Arizona Sate University
Joseph Calantoni Jr. - North Carolina State University
David M. Goldberg - Princeton University Steven
A. Hauck, II - Washington University in Saint Louis
Jose Luis Hernandez - University of Puerto Rico
Robert M. Hueckstaedt - University of Florida
Ilian Iliev - University of Texas at Austin
Christopher M. Klaus - Northern Illinois University
Kevin Lee - University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Paolo de Matthaeis - George Washington University
O. E. Bronson Messer - University of Tennessee
Patrick M. Motl - Louisiana State University
Maria Murillo - University of Colorado at Boulder
Christos Siopis - University of Florida
Victor W. Sletten - Yale University
Lori Jo Willet - University of Missouri - Columbia
Specific topics covered this year included:
General Concepts: the Lax Equivalence and Lax-Wendroff Theorems Finite Element Methods
Gas Dynamics Concepts
Finite Difference Methods for Gas Dynamics Modern Finite Volume Methods
Modern Shock-Capturing Methods
High-Order Godunov Methods (MUSCL, PPM, ENO) Particle-Mesh Methods
Particle-Particle, Particle-Mesh Methods Tree Codes
Methods on Unstructured Grids
Adaptive Mesh Refinement on Structured and Unstructured Grids
Introduction to PARAMESH (GSFC's parallel adaptive mesh refinement package)
Spectral, Pseudospectral, and Spectral Element Methods Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)
Massively Parallel Architectures
Introduction to Beowulf-Class Parallel Architectures
Hands-on Training on the GSFC 1,024-processor CRAY T3E
Hands-on Training on a GSFC Beowulf-Class Parallel Architecture
In addition to the lectures delivered by the regular HPCC Summer School staff, four guest lecturers appeared during the 3-week period:
Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi, George Washington University
Prof. Paul Woodward, University of Minnesota
Dr. Peter Lyster, University of Maryland
Prof. George Lake, University of Washington
A highlight of the Summer School was a special informal appearance on the very last day by Prof. Bram van Leer of the University of Michigan, inventor of MUSCL and the founder of the high-order Godunov movement. Prof. van Leer, whose work was the subject of many of the lectures of the prior weeks, talked and engaged the students in conversation about science, computation, the creative process, and career path choices in the coming decade. It was a special moment, and a fitting cap to the 1998 Summer School.
This year's class brings the total number of HPCC Summer School graduates since the School was started in 1991 to 144.
Steven Zalesak
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
zalesak@gondor.gsfc.nasa.gov
301-286-8935