Supercomputing Conference Highlights NASA Earth, Space Missions

NASA's SC10 exhibit will feature nearly 50 demonstrations including
high-resolution simulations of Hurricane Katrina that give new
insight into tropical storm formation and development. The
simulations potentially could save lives and reduce property damage.
Scientists also will present modeling and simulation projects to
predict and analyze potential and actual sources of debris that pose
risk to remaining space shuttle missions during launch and in orbit;
design and develop next-generation heavy-lift and multipurpose crew
vehicles for future exploration of space; and help reduce aircraft
landing-gear noise, a major source of noise pollution near metropolitan airports.

"Our advanced modeling and simulation tools and expertise are integral
to scientific and engineering advancements throughout NASA," said
Rupak Biswas, chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS)
Division at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

"Combined with the power of supercomputers, massive data storage,
high-speed networks, computer science expertise and visualization
technologies, these numerical computations are critical to agency
work ranging from designing more efficient rotorcraft, to advancing
our understanding of global climate change, to designing and
analyzing new space crew modules, just to name a few."

The high-end computing operations at both the NAS facility at Ames and
the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at the agency's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have undergone significant
expansions to handle the ever-increasing need for computational
resources, particularly for Earth science research.

This year, the NAS facility completed a series of extensions to NASA's
largest supercomputer, Pleiades. The agency increased the system to
84,992 cores, achieving a peak performance of over one petaflop, the
ability to do more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Pleiades is one of the most cost-effective supercomputers in the
world. The recent expansion, in part, supports the NASA Earth
Exchange, a new collaboration platform for the Earth science
community that provides a mechanism for scientific collaboration and
knowledge sharing.

In October 2010, NCCS doubled the capacity of its Discover
supercomputer. The new cluster provides a scalable system with
significantly reduced floor space and highly efficient power and
cooling. Discover's combined 29,368 cores yield a peak performance of
more than 320 teraflops.

"Discover already has begun hosting climate simulation runs for the
next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report that
will go back a full millennium and forward to 2100," said Phil
Webster, NCCS project manager and chief of the Computational and
Information Sciences and Technology Office at Goddard. "With our
newest processors, NASA scientists plan to perform global weather and
climate simulations at resolutions approaching one kilometer, which
is the fidelity of many satellite observations."

Demonstrations in NASA's exhibit (booth # 3839) represent work by
researchers at Ames, Goddard, NASA's Glenn Research Center in
Cleveland; NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.; and NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in addition to
NASA's various university and corporate partners.

For more information about the NASA's exhibit at the SC10 meeting, visit:

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC10

For information about NASA's High-End Computing Program, visit:

http://www.hec.nasa.gov

For information about the SC10 meeting, visit:

http://sc10.supercomputing.org

Source: NASA

---