12/02/02 -- NATO Lectures Spotlight Uninhabited Air Vehicles
Nearly 100 researchers from around the world gathered for the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) lecture series. Sponsored by NASA’s Computing, Information, and Communication Technologies Program. The event was a unique opportunity for researchers to discuss with peers their current work in the area of uninhabited air vehicles (UAVs). UAVs are remotely piloted or self-piloted aircraft that can carry payloads such as cameras, sensors, and communications equipment.

Both NATO and NASA are interested in the design and development of UAVs to meet national security requirements and NASA mission needs. This year’s series, “Applications, Concepts and Technologies for Future Tactical UAVs,” highlighted topics including: integrated mission systems design concepts and alternatives; key enabling; and autonomous operations. The event was held October 29–30, in Palo Alto, Calif., and hosted by Ames Research Center.

Jan Aikins, acting deputy director of the Ames Information Sciences and Technology Directorate, said, “Many of the issues that we have addressed in the past and that we continue to explore for the future here at NASA Ames Research Center are the same issues being discussed by those of you attending this NATO event. Our researchers [at Ames] are dealing with both development and applications of autonomous control technologies for science, with human-machine interfaces for ground control systems, and with policies and regulations necessary for operating in the national airspace, among others. We are pleased to be hosting this event, and are delighted to be working with you to further our common research goals for UAVs.”

Three members of the NATO lecture series team were among the panel of speakers. James Ramage discussed considerations for future UAV research and technology development. “Current military needs have spawned a new era in UAV systems – I have no doubt about that,” Ramage stated. He said that stringent safety regulations and technology maturity of unmanned aircraft will continue to present a huge challenge for UAV designers and developers. The “bottom line,” said Ramage, is that, “R&D directions should emphasize demonstration and validation of key enabling technologies in realistic integrated system operation environments, using mission relevant metrics.”

John Kitowski and Robert Frampton, also on the NATO lecture team, spoke on the economical and technological challenges associated with UAVs, and the increasing role of UAVs in support of combat missions, respectively.

Acting Chief of the Ames Computational Sciences Division, Daniel Clancy, presented “Autonomy for Deep Space Exploration as Relevant to UAVs.” Clancy described clear autonomy needs of the upcoming NASA Europa mission, scheduled for launch in March 2008. This mission entails the robotic exploration of Europa to search for evidence of life. “Autonomy is a capability, not some flashy technology -- it increases safety and capability,” Clancy said.

Heinz Erzberger, senior scientist in the Aviation Systems Division at Ames, discussed the center’s newest air traffic management technologies and decision support tools, which have been fielded with great success. Said Erzberger: “I saw several parallels in the UAV automation and in the air traffic management automation, especially with respect to the human interface and situational awareness issues.”

This is NASA’s second year of hosting a NATO lecture series. Next year’s NATO event on this topic will take place in June 2003. For more information on the lecture series, visit NATO's "Research & Technology Organisaton" website.

11/07/02 -- NAS Research Featured at SC2002 Conference
The latest research from the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division will be showcased at the NASA exhibit at SC2002, the Conference of High Performance Computing and Networking in Baltimore, November 16-22.

“For more than 20 years, NASA has been a leader in the development and application of high-performance computing systems that further the Agency’s science and engineering work,” said John Ziebarth, acting chief of the NAS Division at Ames Research Center. “SC2002 will again showcase our recent accomplishments, including research results that are only possible on NASA’s unique supercomputers, data analysis methods that are not yet available to the rest of the scientific community, and science products resulting from NASA-university collaborations.”

One example of such collaboration, shown at SC2002, is a simulation-based medical planning technique for heart bypass surgery. Researchers at the Center for Turbulence Research, a Stanford University-NASA Ames consortium, are working to create a simulation-based medical planning system for treating cardiovascular disease that uses computational methods developed at Ames to evaluate alternative surgical options prior to treatment. The blood flow simulation techniques allow surgeons to see flow features resulting from a proposed operation and to determine if they pose potential adverse effects, such as increased risk of atherosclerosis and blood clot formation.

The NASA exhibit will also feature Cart3D, NASA's Software of the Year 2002. Cart3D, co-developed by Michael Aftosmis in the NAS Division, is a software package for fully automating aerodynamic simulations around complex flight vehicles; for example the complete space shuttle with boosters and attachment hardware. SC2002 attendees can select and manipulate pre-built vehicle geometries, and set up aerodynamic simulations over a range of flight conditions. These simulations then can be submitted for processing on NASA’s Information Power Grid.

Get details about all NASA research showcased at the conference on the NASA SC2002 website.

Official press release.

10/29/02 -- Experts Look for Common Ground at NASA Workshop
More than 100 experts in the fields of biology, information science, and nanotechnology met at NASA Ames Research Center this month to explore cross-disciplinary approaches to solving the science and technology challenges facing future NASA missions.

Organized by the NAS Division and the Universities Space Research, the Biology, Information Science, Nanotechnology Fusion and NASA Missions Invitational Workshop, held October 7-9, was the first of its kind, designed to explore the emerging fusion of these three fields of science.

"Our goal was to start a conversation and gather new ideas,” said T.R. Govindan, NAS senior scientist and co-chair of the workshop. “This is a very diverse group of people and everyone speaks their own jargon, but the presentations gave us excellent examples of what this research might accomplish.”

Experts from universities, industry, and government agencies throughout the U.S. joined NASA personnel for three days of presentations, panel talks, and discussions covering topics that included the use of DNA to solve IT challenges, life detection and sensors, computational biology and bioinformatics, and nanotechnology assembly.

By inviting mission experts from a multitude of NASA enterprises to talk about their needs and challenges, the workshop leaders accomplished the goal of on matching these nascent research areas to NASA’s mission needs.

Participants Baruch Blumberg, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, and Michael Storrie-Lombardi of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs both agreed the meeting was “an important first step in bringing these sciences together” and hoped it would lead to a concentrated effort to follow up on the leads and themes discussed.

Govindan said the next step will be to publish a report detailing the themes, ideas, and suggestions that emerged from the workshop, and provide a framework for moving forward. “Based on the level of enthusiasm and interest in the fusion of these three fields, it’s likely that this kind of conference might become a regular event,” he said.

For more information, contact T.R. Govindan at govindan@nas.nasa.gov.

10/17/02 -- New System Automates CFD Parameter Studies on the Information Power Grid
A group of NAS Division scientists has successfully developed an automated system for executing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) parameter studies on NASA’s Information Power Grid (IPG). The AeroDB system simplifies the process of executing many CFD calculations, while taking advantage of timesaving in a distributed computing environment.

“We wanted to design a tool to automate the process of running and monitoring our CFD tools, Cart3D, and Overflow, ” explained Stuart Rogers, senior scientist on the AeroDB project. “This idea fused with our goal of bringing these applications onto the IPG and demonstrating their usability.”

In its initial trial, AeroDB scripts were used to execute and monitor cases for a large parameter study on a Liquid Glide-back Booster (LGBB) vehicle. Within 72 hours, more than 1000 Cart3D and 100 Overflow cases had completed. “We continued running jobs for seven days and completed just over 3000, so we felt that was pretty successful,” adds Rogers.

The trial used 13 different computing resources at four different locations: NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley; NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio; the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California; and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois.

The AeroDB system includes a series of Perl scripts that interact with IPG software tools. Globusrun launched the jobs, the Grid Common Services broker determined the appropriate execution sites, and user authentication was enabled with grid certificates.

The success of the project surpasses one of NASA’s Computing, Information, and Communications Technology’s (CICT) Grand Challenge Milestones, established just six months ago. The CICT Program is an agency-wide effort to develop and deploy key technologies for a broad range of NASA mission-critical tasks that perform beyond the capabilities of commercially available solutions.

The AeroDB system includes: Perl scripts to automate pre- and post-processing, a database to store information about each job, and a web portal to provide information to users about the status of each job. Now that they have proof of usability, Rogers and his team are working on further enhancements to the system, which will improve speed, convergence, error recovery, and the user interface -- making AeroDB a highly useful tool for doing CFD calculations within NASA.

For more information on AeroDB, contact Stuart Rogers at rogers@nas.nasa.gov, (650) 604-4481.

10/01/02 -- New Scientific Reports Published
Several NAS Technical Reports have recently been published online, including: "Resource Selection Using Execution and Queue Wait Time Predictions," by Warren Smith and Parkson Wong. Using instance-based learning techniques and simulations of scheduling algorithms, the team can help computational grid users predict start times and execution times of applications on space-shared parallel computers.

• Browse more 2002 NAS Technical Reports.