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NAS FEATURED NEWS
NAS Teamwork Helps Researchers Cruise Through Ocean Data
Resourceful work by the NAS visualization and network teams -- plus number crunching by the Columbia supercomputer -- is helping researchers increase their understanding of the ocean's influence on climate.
08.30.06
Working with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), experts at the NAS facility visualized, in real time, a one-year ocean simulation with 330 million grid cells running on 2,048 processors of the Columbia supercomputer. Results are being used to increase the understanding of the ocean's influence on climate -- for example, to develop a better understanding of air-sea exchanges of carbon dioxide, heat, moisture, and other key properties of the climate system.
Caption: (Above right) Salt concentration (salinity) in the global ocean, in parts per thousand (approximating grams of salt per liter of seawater), at a depth of 15 meters. This is a single frame from a series that includes every five-minute timestep from a simulation of an entire year of ocean dynamics. Credit: C. Henze, NAS Division
(Click on image to enlarge.)
The July 31 computational run of the MIT General Circulation Model (MITgcm) employed 48 concurrent visualization data streams capturing features such as ocean temperature, speed, and salinity. The resultant five million images (requiring nearly 13 terabytes of storage) allow the researchers to investigate MITcgm's behavior with unprecedented temporal resolution; for example, correlated daily and seasonal variations among many different properties are easily distinguished.
"The 2,048-CPU system and the NAS visualization team made these improved simulations possible," said Chris Hill, MIT's investigator. "Using the power of Columbia and the NAS team's expertise, we were able to see, at much higher spatial and temporal resolution than normal, the dynamic and complex processes by which the ocean and atmosphere exchange properties critical to the climate system." This work is part of the ECCO2 project, under the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) Consortium.
ECCO2 aims to produce increasingly accurate syntheses of all available global-scale ocean and sea-ice data at resolutions that start to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow current systems, which transport heat, carbon, and other attributes within the ocean.
The ECCO concurrent visualization was made possible by the NAS local area network (LAN) team, which set up and fine-tuned a high-speed LAN connection that drove 74 terabytes of data from Columbia to the NAS hyperwall visualization system at an impressive sustained rate of 215 megabytes per second over 100 hours. "The network ran flawlessly throughout the entire run," said LAN team lead Christopher Buchanan. A subset of visualization streams was also sent across the country to a 16-panel hyperwall display at MIT.
Next on the ECCO2 agenda will be to analyze and explore the massive output to gain new scientific insights. The NAS visualization team will create more images and further analyze the numerical data captured.
Caption: (Left) The HECC LAN team set up, maintained, debugged, and tuned a high-speed LAN connection between Columbia and the hyperwall visualization system through a system dubbed "chunnel."
(Click on image to enlarge.)
For more information on NAS' scientific visualization and networking services contact (respectively):
Chris Henze,
Christopher.E.Henze@nasa.gov
Christopher Buchanan, cbuchanan@mail.arc.nasa.gov
For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/home/
- Jill Dunbar
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