05/28/03 -- HiMAP Used to Predict Abrupt Wing Stall on F-18 Aircraft
Award-winning NASA software HiMAP (High-fidelity Multidisciplinary Analysis Process) has been successfully applied to a joint project with the U.S. Navy to understand certain phenomena involved in Abrupt Wing Stall (AWS) on its F-18 E/F Aircraft. The project, "Computational Prediction of Abrupt Wing Stall (AWS) on the F-18 E/F Aircraft," was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and monitored by the Naval Air Warfare Center in Maryland.

“NASA Ames was chosen as the lead center to do the CFD calculations,” explains NAS senior scientist and HiMAP developer Guru Guruswamy. “We used HiMAP because of its unique ability as a multidiscipline software to solve fluids, structures and controls, and because it works on multilevel parallel systems.”

The HiMAP computations were conducted on Lomax, an SGI Origin 3000 supercomputer, in collaboration with the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, and involved 17 million grid points and 104 processors. One of the most important observations made from the computations involved the effect of area rule on aircraft lift in certain configurations. The area rule applies to the wave drag of an aircraft.

“I am very pleased to acknowledge the outstanding cooperation, expertise and support Guru Guruswamy and David Rodriguez contributed to this project,” said the project’s principle investigator, Max Platzer of the NPS. “It showed that area ruling can have a significant effect on the development of AWS in the transonic flight regime.” The AWS project concluded at the end of 2002.

HiMAP was developed under NASA’s High Performance Computing and Communication Project, and efficiently integrates software analysis tools to solve large-scale multidisciplinary problems on massively parallel supercomputers. The technology can also be applied in other fields, such as automotive, mechanical, civil- and bio-engineering. HiMAP has been successfully used on NASA’s High Speed Civil Transport Project, NASA’s Advanced Subsonic Transport project, and DARPA’s Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle Project. In 2002, the NAS team led by Guruswamy received the 2002 NASA Space Act Software Release award for their development of HiMAP.

For more information on HiMAP, contact Guru Guruswamy at Guru.P.Guruswamy@nasa.gov.

04/29/03 -- New Report Studies NASA Open Source Options
A new NAS Technical Report describing the importance of Open Source Software (OSS) to NASA has been published and is available online. The report, "Developing An Open Source Option for NASA Software," (NAS Technical Report NAS-03-009) describes how OSS is consistent with NASA's charter and in line with the NASA mission. 

The report includes information from a 2000 report in support of OSS, authored by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) -- which included participants from NASA Ames Research Center. The NAS technical report also references efforts within the Department of Energy laboratories to provide an Open Source option for its software development. The NAS report is a byproduct of meetings with the Information Technology & Sciences Directorate and Ames Commercial Technology Office. The goal of the directorate meetings has been to develop a consistent Open Source policy for Ames, with the longer term potential of influencing agency policy.

For more information on NAS' Open Source Software effort, send email to Patrick Moran at patrickjmoran@nas.nasa.gov.