6/26/01-- NAS Engineer Honored at Annual Flemming Awards
NAS Division aerospace engineer Stuart Rogers has been awarded the prestigious Arthur S. Flemming Award for his contributions to the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Rogers' development and application of CFD tools have resulted in significant strides in solving real-world fluid dynamics problems, including analysis and design of complex aircraft, spacecraft, and submarines.

Dr. Rogers' work has had far-reaching benefits to NASA and the aerospace industry by providing tools that reduce the cost and design-cycle time of aerospace vehicles and components.

"Stu has expertise not only in algorithms for computational flow simulation and in computer science for developing software, but he also has deep understanding of flow physics, says Dochan Kwak, chief of NAS's Applications Branch. "On top of his multifaceted talents, Stu is an extremely hard-working researcher. It's not surprising that he's made many critical contributions to Ames, NASA, and the nation's technical well being."

Among Rogers' many important accomplishments in his 12 years at NASA Ames Research Center are the development of a software tools package that allow first-of-a-kind flow computation about entire subsonic transport aircraft, including simulation of a complete Boeing 777 aircraft in a high-lift landing configuration. The Chimera Grid Tools software package, together with the OVERFLOW flow solver, received honorable mention in the 1998 NASA Software of the Year Award.

Rogers also co-developed the INS3D code resulting in world-class production software for the solution of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The code has had a broad impact on a wide range of applications, including advanced rocket pump development and the development of the DeBakey Ventricular Assist Device, a miniaturized heart pump that prolongs the life of patients awaiting a transplant.

Rogers holds a bachelor's degree and a master's degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado, and earned a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering from Stanford University. His recent research and development work has been funded by NASA's High Performance Computing and Communications Program.

The Arthur S. Flemming Awards, established in 1948, honor outstanding federal employees. For more information on OVERFLOW and INS3D, contact Rogers at 650 604-4481 or rogers@nas.nasa.gov.

6/1/01 -- NASA Ames Gets New Cray SV1 Supercomputer
NASA's Consolidated Supercomputing Management Office (CoSMO) has leased a Cray SV1e vector supercomputer from Cray Inc. Seattle, through Government Micro Resources Inc. The system, installed at the NAS Facility at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. on May 25, will be used for scientific applications in aerospace, earth science, and space science.

The new system, which will replace CoSMO's current CRAY C90, has 32 processors (CPUs) and 4 gigawords (GW) of main memory, compared to the C90's 16 CPUs and 1 GW of memory. Another 4 GW of solid state memory will be installed later this year to create a Cray SV1ex. The air-cooled SV1e is a fourth-generation CMOS vector system designed to handle a broad range of vector application workloads.

"We hope the new system will be stable by the beginning of July and available to selected users for production use, " says CoSMO Deputy Director Ken Stevens. "After installation and acceptance of the "x" solid state memory, we hope to transition all users from the C90 to the Cray SV1ex."

The SV1ex enhancement will include improved clock speed to 450 megahertz and improved cache over the Cray SV1. NAS staff will install additional applications (such as the computational fluid dynamics programs OVERFLOW and Laura) and math libraries on the SV1 to match the current C90 environment. After benchmarks are run, several experienced users will test-run their own applications. After running both systems in parallel for about a month, the C90 will be retired.

Once testing is complete, users from government organizations, -- as well as industry and university users with government contracts, grants, or cooperative agreements -- will be able to use the SV1e for their large-scale, scientific applications.

For more information on CoSMO's Cray SV1e, contact Ken Stevens, at (650) 604-5949, kstevens@mail.arc.nas.gov.

5/22/01 -- Race Car and Ozone Teaching Modules Updated
The NAS Division's web team has updated the division's most popular web pages -- two K-12 study modules designed for teachers and students. Both modules have glossaries and images to download.

Aerodynamics in Car Racing includes segments on car development, racing physics, and design and testing. Stratospheric Ozone Depletion covers controversial theories, Internet resources, and scientific models.

For a list of links to many other NASA education websites, see Education Resources.

5/09/01 --Report Compares Parameter Study Tools
A recent NAS technical report "A Comparison of Parameter Study Creation and Job Submission Tools," compares the differences among available general-purpose parameter study and job submission tools. NAS authors Adrian DeVivo, Maurice Yarrow, and Karen McCann, focus on comparing a new NAS-developed software package, called ILab, from other tools. Results show that ILab, is easier to use, completes jobs significantly faster, and is better suited to research and engineering environments.

The team compared the functionality of ILab, Nimrod/G, Nimrod/Clustor, Condor, and AppLeS/APST. For background on ILab, see the NAS feature story, "ILab: Rx for Parameter Study Headaches."

For technical details, contact Karen McCann at mccann@nas.nasa.gov, or Maurice Yarrow at yarrow@nas.nasa.gov.

5/01/01 -- Mansour Appointed Deputy Director for CTR
Dr. Nagi Nicolas Mansour, lead scientist for the NAS Division's Physics Simulation and Modeling Office, has been appointed Deputy Director for the Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) at Ames Reseach Center. Dr. Mansour has extensive experience in turbulence research, and has served as Ames coordinator to the CTR for the past six years. Mansour will continue his duties in the NAS Division.

Mansour holds a bachelor of engineering in mechanical engineering, master's degrees in mechanical engineering and mathematics, and a Ph.D in mechanical engineering. Mansour was elected as an Associate Fellow of the AIAA. He was also elected Fellow of the American Physical Society for his work on Turbulence and Drops and Bubbles.

The CTR is a research consortium for fundamental study of turbulent flows. Jointly operated by NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University, the CTR's principal objective is to stimulate significant advances in physical understanding of turbulence, leading to improved capabilities for control of turbulence and turbulence modeling for engineering analysis. Particular emphasis is placed on probing turbulent flow fields, developed by direct numerical simulations and/or laboratory experiments using new diagnostic techniques and mathematical methods, and on concepts for turbulence control and modeling. The CTR is directing its attention to areas of application of fluid dynamics to biology and the origin of life, protoplanetary disks, and atmospheric and geophysical flow phenomena.

For more information, contact Nagi Mansour nmansour@mail.arc.nasa.gov, (650) 604-6420.

4/24/01 -- NAS Name Change Reflects HPC Focus
After nearly 20 years of sustained growth, the Numerical Aerospace Simulation (NAS) Systems Division, located within the Information Sciences and Technology Directorate is changing its name to the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division. The change more accurately reflects the division's leadership role within the high-performance computing and information technology communities.

The NAS Division was formed in the early 1980s to simultaneously develop supercomputers and advance the science of computational fluid dynamics. The division has since evolved as a world leader in the development of NASA's Information Power Grid (IPG), which allows remotely located researchers to access distant computational resources; and through its NASA Research and Engineering Network (NREN) affiliate, engineers within the NAS Division are working to build the Next Generation Internet (NGI).

The NAS Division will continue to focus in areas of research that are key to developing new, integrated high performance computing environments such as the the IPG: applications, problem-solving environments, networks, high-performance computing, mass storage, grid common services, and other research areas (such as nanotechnology and device modeling).

For more information, contact NAS Deputy Division Chief John Ziebarth at ziebarth@nas.nasa.gov.

4/17/01 -- NAS Researcher Tackles Puzzling Nanotechnology Problem
NAS researcher Toshishige Yamada recently presented a new interpretation of a problem that has puzzled scientists for several years. In the past, researchers have observed strange current-voltage (I-V) patterns in a scanning tunneling microscope tip-carbon nanotube system, and attributed them to the intrinsic nanotube properties.

Now, Yamada has proposed a new model for the observed patterns. His work shows that a measurement electrode-nanotube junction is responsible for the observed behavior, and not the nanotube itself.

Yamada's paper, "Modeling of Electronic Transport in Scanning Tunneling Microscope Tip - Carbon Nanotube System, " was presented at the American Physical Society Meeting in Seattle, March 12-16, and published in Applied Physical Letters, Vol. 78 (12) pp. 1739-1741 (2001).

For more information, contact Yamada at yamada@nas.nasa.gov, 650-604-4333.

4/05/01 -- Spring 2001 Issue of Gridpoints Online
Take a look at the spring 2001 issue of Gridpoints (PDF) the NAS Systems Division's quarterly magazine. In "Chimera Grid Tools Software,"researchers William Chan and Stuart Rogers describe the updated features in this well-known software package for generating overset grids. Other stories detail the Information Power Grid's newest tools and successes.