Don Nolan-Proxmire
Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
(Phone: 202/358-1983)
Allen Kenitzer
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(Phone: 301/286-2806)
Jarrett Cohen
Hughes STX Corp.
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(Phone: 301/286-2744)
RELEASE: 96-173
NASA-funded development of Grand Challenge supercomputer applications, 10 times faster than today, will provide a new understanding of the fundamental problems in the Earth and space sciences.
A $25.8 million set of cooperative agreements is supporting collaboration among NASA, nine investigator teams, and Cray Research (a business unit of Silicon Graphics, Inc.) of Eagan, Minn., to achieve these advances. The challenges being pursued include modeling changes in global climate and the Earth's interior, simulating the evolution and dynamics of stars, probing microgravity environments, and processing remote sensing imagery and signals. For broader benefit, the new computer programs and documentation will be made available to the research community on the World Wide Web's National High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Software Exchange.
The three-year agreements are funded through the Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) Project of NASA's HPCC Program.
Science advances will be enabled by a 384-processor CRAY T3E supercomputer being placed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., as part of a $13.2 million agreement with Cray Research. "With 49 billion bytes of memory and 230 billion floating-point operations per second peak performance, this system will be NASA's leading testbed for scalable parallel computing, in which a program's speed increases proportionally with the number of processors," said James Fischer, ESS Project Manager. Cray Research subsequently will assemble a CRAY T3E as large as 1,024 processors to allow 100 billion floating-point operations per second sustained on investigator applications.
"This effort will further the Earth and space sciences by helping to overcome one of high-performance computing's greatest bottlenecks -- the lack of usable software for parallel machines," said Lee Holcomb, Director, Aviation Systems Technology Division at NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. "Such computational studies strongly mesh with NASA's observational and theoretical programs and contribute to our wider mission of scientific research and space exploration."
Encompassing 86 researchers at 22 U.S. universities and six federal laboratories, the investigations are as follows:
Three Dimensional Spherical Simulations of the Earth's Core and Mantle Dynamics: a $1.2 million cooperative agreement with Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; Peter Olson, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, principal investigator. The team will simulate the chaotic processes that drive the evolution of the planet's interior, and in turn shape its surface, over timescales ranging from hundreds to millions of years.
Advanced Computing Technology Applications to SAR Interferometry and Imaging Science: a $1.4 million cooperative agreement with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif.; David Curkendall, Center for Space Microelectronics Technology, principal investigator. Use of multiple supercomputers to process and visualize satellite-collected synthetic aperture radar data will allow close monitoring of regional changes in alpine glaciers, plate tectonics, and rain forests.
Four Dimensional Data Assimilation -- Investigation of High Performance Computing and Current Algorithms at Goddard Data Assimilation Office: a $1.31 million cooperative agreement with the University of Maryland, College Park; Peter Lyster, Department of Meteorology, principal investigator. The focus of this work is melding observations and climate model prediction into a robust data analysis scheme for NASA's Earth Observing System, thereby providing the most accurate possible picture of the atmosphere through space and time.
Development of an Earth System Model -- Atmosphere/Ocean Dynamics and Tracers Chemistry: a $2 million cooperative agreement with the University of California, Los Angeles; Carlos R. Mechoso, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, principal investigator. Aimed at realistic portrayal of the Earth's climate, this effort will develop and couple four highly complex models with high spatial resolutions: atmospheric general circulation, oceanic general circulation, atmospheric chemistry, and oceanic chemistry.
Scalable Parallel Finite Element Computations of Rayleigh-Benard-Marangoni Problems in a Microgravity Environment: a $900,000 cooperative agreement with the University of Texas, Austin; Graham Carey, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, principal investigator. Modeling of fluid flows in low gravity environments will test the effectiveness of manufacturing higher quality thin films and coating processes in space and the functioning of the space station's life support and safety systems.
Turbulent Convection and Dynamos in Stars: a $1.74 million cooperative agreement with the University of Chicago; Andrea Malagoli, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, principal investigator. This group will study some of the most fundamental and least understood turbulent processes in the interior of stars like the Sun, whose dynamics are only beginning to be inferred from new space probe and Earth-based observations.
Understanding Solar Activity and Heliospheric Dynamics: a $1.3 million cooperative agreement with the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C; John Gardner, Laboratory for Computational Physics and Fluid Dynamics, principal investigator. As NASA observations show their key role in the physics of solar activity, the tangled three-dimensional structures that develop in the magnetic field of the Sun's corona, or outermost layer, will be modeled.
Parallel Adaptive Methods for Multiscale Modeling of the Heliosphere: a $1.4 million cooperative agreement with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Tamas Gombosi, Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences, principal investigator. From the corona to the free-streaming interstellar medium, computational studies will be used to understand the interaction of the solar wind with galactic gases and plasmas, as well as with magnetized and unmagnetized bodies in the solar system.
A Multipurpose Three Dimensional Code for Relativistic Astrophysics and Gravitational Wave Astronomy -- Application to Coalescing Neutron Star Binaries: a $1.35 million cooperative agreement with the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Paul Saylor, Department of Computer Science, principal investigator. Combining fluid dynamics and general relativity, this project will develop computational methods to investigate the merger of two neutron stars, a process that encompasses many aspects of relativistic astrophysics and thus provides a basis for studying similar phenomena such as black holes and supernovae.
In August, Cray Research will place an interim CRAY T3D system (the CRAY T3E's predecessor) with 512 processors and 32 billion bytes of memory at Goddard. By June 1997, NASA and the investigators will complete transition to the 384-processor CRAY T3E. Access to larger CRAY T3E systems will occur before the program's conclusion in 1999. Time on the computers will be divided among ESS Project and NASA HPCC Computational Aerosciences Project investigations and other NASA Earth and space sciences researchers.
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