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NAS FEATURED NEWS
NAS Code Optimization Effort Quadruples Performance of Important Software for Aerodynamic Analysis and Design
Expert programming to fine-tune software that analyzes flow on aircraft designs will save time and money for NASA and industry.
10.11.06
In August 2006, NAS Division computer scientist Jim Taft achieved a remarkable 3.67-times speed-up in performance on a key aerodynamic analysis code, USM3D. The code is frequently used on NASA's Columbia supercomputer to analyze the aerodynamic flow of vehicle designs, for improved flight performance.
Taft's code optimization work on USM3D will result in substantial savings in time and money by significantly enhancing engineers' productivity; for example, by speeding the creation of aerodynamic databases for NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV), and Launch Abort System, which will require thousands of flow solutions over the next several years. His improvements to USM3D, already considered one of the fastest unstructured flow solvers available, will open new levels of research and productivity.
Caption: (Above right) Grid and pressure contours (108 million tetrahedral cells) on the Boeing 777 landing configuration. USM3D, a tetrahedral-cell-centered Navier-Stokes flow solver, is part of the NASA Tetrahedral Unstructured Software System (TetrUSS) suite. (Click on image to enlarge)
"I have to say that over the last 16 years of leading the TetrUSS team, I've seen only a few advancements with this level of impact," said Neal Frink, who heads the TetrUSS team at NASA Langley Research Center. "We have some staggering computational needs ahead under the agency's Aviation Safety and Constellation programs, so this advance is particularly timely."
Frink is now working with Taft and the NAS visualization team to build a more integrated, large-scale unstructured computing and flow visualization capability on the Columbia supercomputer. One of the first undertakings to benefit from this effort is NASA's Aviation Safety Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control (IRAC) Project, which will utilize computational fluid dynamics tools to compute the dynamic stability and control properties of commercial jetliners under extreme flight conditions, over the next 5 - 10 years. Their goal is to improve the survivability of jetliners from potentially catastrophic loss-of-control events.
USM3D is a tetrahedral-cell-centered Navier-Stokes flow solver that is part of the NASA Tetrahedral Unstructured Software System (TetrUSS) suite, which won the NASA Software of the Year Award in 1996 and 2004. The code is used to produce computational aerodynamic simulations in support of a wide range of government and industry projects.
For more information on NAS code optimization services, contact:
Jim Taft,
jtaft@nas.nasa.gov
For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/home/
- Jill Dunbar
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