3/28/01 -- NASA-Industry Team Improves Supercomputers to Reach Dreams
Simulating life's beginning and accurately predicting hurricane paths are two distant dreams that came a small step closer to reality when NASA recently was first to "boot" what may be the most powerful parallel supercomputer of its kind. Ames contributed innovations to previous test bed machines that helped make the SGI Origin 3000 512-processor computer possible. Full press release...

3/19/01 -- New Globus Quick Start Guide Available
An updated version of the Globus Quick Start Guide is now available online in PDF format for users of NASA's Information Power Grid (IPG). The guide helps new IPG users get started on using the grid. This version includes an extensive chapter on the Globus Resource Specification Language (RSL), a common interchange language to provide complicated resource descriptions.

Other new content includes "how-tos" for new users on getting accounts, certificates, and proxies, plus expanded examples in the chapter "Running a Job."

The Globus Quick Start Guide is a joint effort between the Globus Project and the IPG team in the NAS Division. For more information, contact Pamela P. Walatka at 650-604-4461, walatka@nas.nasa.gov. Scientists interested in using IPG high-performance computing resources can contact Leigh Ann Tanner at latanner@mail.arc.nasa.gov.

3/13/01 -- Understanding How Electrons Spin
A study to determine how electrons spin has been published in the journal, Physica Status Solidi-B, Vol. 222, p. 523 (2000). The study, "Dyakonov-Perel Effect on Spin Dephasing in n-Type GaAs," conducted by Cun-Zheng Ning, NAS Research Branch, and M. Wu, University of California at Santa Barbara, explores the possibility of using electron spin coherence for application to faster, more energy-efficient information processing in the future.

Using a new quantum kinetic theory, Ning and Wu have conducted a large-scale computer simulation to determine the electron spin coherence lifetime in Gallium Arsenide (GaAs), a compound semiconductor material typically used for optoelectronics applications. The quantum kinetic approach and the results obtained will help in the understanding of spin coherence for future information technology, and for quantum information processing and transport.

For more information on this research, contact Cun-Zheng Ning at cning@nas.nasa.gov.

3/6/01-- IPG Website Gets New Look, Features
The NASA Information Power Grid (IPG) website has been updated to provide grid users and developers with a new navigation system to locate information more easily. The update includes Launch Pad, an easy-to-use job-launching tool released in February 2001. The website, which also sports a new look, is geared toward scientists and engineers using the IPG high-performance computing resources.

Also on the IPG website:

• A news section to announce noteworthy items, upcoming workshops and other IPG-related events.
• Information for new users on how to get an account and a certificate and basic information on how to use the grid.
• Current status on tasks. Some information is restricted to those developers and engineers working on projects.
• General information on the IPG mission and vision.

The new site was created by IPG web team members Farah Hasnat, George Myers, Pam Walatka, and Mark Wallace. For more information on the IPG website, contact George Myers at gmyers@nas.nas.gov.

2/20/01 --New Communication Lines Open for Grid Community
Two new methods of communicating and collaborating for NASA's Information Power Grid (IPG) community have recently been established. The "ipg-applications" mailing list is a forum for discussion, collaboration, and posting of issues related to grid computing, algorithms, and applications that are now or can potentially run on the IPG infrastructure. Other topics of general interest to the IPG applications community may also be posted.

In addition to the mailing list, an IPG Applications Teleconference and meeting has been organized. Meeting are held Mondays at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

For more information on how to subscribing to the mailing list and participate in the teleconference meetings, contact Arsi Vaziri, IPG deputy project manager, at vaziri@nas.nasa.gov.

For more technical information on the IPG, see the IPG home page.

2/9/01 -- New Nanotechnology Paper Published
A NAS nanotechnology research paper, "Temperature Dependence of the Thermal Conductivity of Nanotubes," by M. Osman and Deepak Srivastava, has been published in the journal Nanotechnology (Vol. 12, No. 1, March 2001, 21-24). The authors investigated the thermal conductivity of carbon nanotubes for possible future application in heat transport management on VLSI chips.

Their findings will help in specific designs for directional heat transport from a "hot spot" to a heat sink that could be fabricated in the outer regimes of the chip.

Using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations, Osman and Srivastava studied temperature, radial, and chirality dependence of single-wall carbon nanotubes. They found that temperature dependence is a strong function of the radius of carbon nanotubes, and not of chirality. They also found that smaller diameter nanotubes are more suitable for efficient heat transport at room temperature.

The researchers are continuing their investigation to include heat transport in multiwall nanotubes and across other materials interfaces. For more information, contact Srivastava at deepak@nas.nasa.gov, (650), 604-3486.

The landing site section of the Marsoweb for the 2003 missions was developed, in part, for a Mars landing site workshop held at NASA Ames January 24-26. Graphics from the Mars site were used frequently in workshop participants' talks, according to Deardorff. "The Website was well received and is being very actively used." NASA Mars Exploration Program Scientist Jim Garvin found work on the landing site Web pages to be "exemplary."

The new landing site section enables researchers to navigate landing sites within the equatorial landing zone of Mars using Java-based image maps generated from geology maps, elevation data, high-resolution MGS images, and a number of other datasets. Much of the data available on the site was presented to the Mars research community for the first time at the January workshop. Deardorff plans to incorporate datasets for the entire surface of Mars in the future.

For more information, contact Glenn Deardorff at deardorf@nas.nasa.gov, (650) 604-3169.

1/23/01 --High Dependability Computing Workshop a Success
The first High Dependability Computing Consortium (HDCC) workshop was held at the NAS Facility January 10-12 to gather parties interested in making computer software more reliable for the future. In a partnership to form the HDCC, Carnegie Mellon University and NASA Ames Research Center had the same goal in mind -- to eliminate computer failures. "This is an extremely important event for NASA -- future missions depend on the long-term success of software reliability and dependability," says Steve Zornetzer, director of Information Sciences and Technology at Ames. "This consortium represents a very unique and bold approach to tackling one of the most vexing problems, and potentially one of the most important problems for the advancement of information technology in the 21st century," he says.

When a computer fails, any number of things can go wrong -- downtime results in hundreds of thousands of E-commerce dollars lost every hour, computer failures in space endangers NASA mission success, and computer software failures at the bank translate to no money at the ATM. All these problems can be avoided by funneling time and effort into ensuring dependability of the software used to run computers.

During the three-day event, participants from industry, government, and academia reviewed case studies and participated in technology discussions to start the wheels turning on the journey to software reliability. Speakers at the workshop based their presentations on past software failures, present capabilities, and requirements for future computing to emphasize the importance of software dependability. Participants included specialists from the University of Southern California, Hewlett-Packard, NASA Goddard Space Center, Bell Laboratories, the Department of Defense, and McMaster University, among others.

"I'm hoping that this will be the beginning of a continuous process by which we put together a long-term effort (20 or 50 years) to build not just the industry, but the field of computer science," says Jim Morris, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. The workshop planning committee will schedule more events in the near future.

1/03/01 -- New Web Features for NAS Users
A secure new tool for scientists using the NAS Facility's supercomputing resources debuts this week on our website. The System Status page, allows users to view important information on the operational status and utilization of computing and storage resources. User can also check scheduled maintenance periods and get other useful data.

From one page, users can:

• get message of the day (MOTD) for each user type
• see the schedule for upcoming system outages, and review previous outages
• find out if any systems are "down" and check system status history
• view network router status
• view and print a histogram showing system and storage utilization

Local NAS Facility users can also get status on printer queues. Developed by Ernst Kimler in the NAS Engineering Branch, the page data automatically updates every 10 minutes. For more information, contact Kimler at ernst@nas.nasa.gov.

Also new to the User Services section:

• a User FAQ page, with answers to basic questions about using NAS computing resources
• an easy-to-access user help form to request assistance with a problem

For user-related assistance, contact NAS User Services at support@nas.nasa.gov or call (800-331-8737).

1/02/01 -- New NAS Tech Report Published
Check out our newest technical report, "Efficient Cache Use for Stencil Operations on Structured Discretization Grids," by NAS researchers Michael Frumpkin and Rob Van der Wijngaart.