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SC2002 TO FEATURE INNOVATIVE NASA RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY
November
7, 2002
Michael
Mewhinney
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Phone: 650/604-3937 or 650/604-9000
E-mail: mmewhinney@mail.arc.nasa.gov
NASA's
cutting-edge research in high-performance computing will be showcased
at an upcoming seven-day conference in Baltimore.
SC2002,
the Conference of High Performance Computing and Networking, will
be held Nov. 16-22 at the Baltimore Convention Center. This year's
theme, "From Terabytes to Insights," emphasizes the opportunity
to use technology to transform an ever-increasing flow of data into
the knowledge that will impact education, science, business, government
and every aspect of society.
"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 NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA's
Ames Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley.
"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."
The
40-by-40-foot NASA exhibit will showcase more than 25 demonstrations
and numerous panel discussions on topics ranging from homeland security
to innovations in high-end computing. Scientists from five NASA
centers will feature a variety of real-time and interactive demonstrations
of the latest research in computational applications serving NASA's
aerospace, Earth science and space science missions.
Featured
at NASA's SC2002 exhibit will be a demonstration of simulation-based
medical planning for heart bypass surgery. The current paradigm
for cardiovascular surgery planning relies exclusively on diagnostic
imaging data to define the present state of the patient, empirical
data to evaluate the effectiveness of prior treatments for similar
patients, and the judgment of the surgeon to decide on a preferred
treatment.
Researchers
at Stanford University and the Center for Turbulence Research, a
Stanford-/NASA Ames consortium, are working to create a simulation-based
medical planning system for treating cardiovascular disease that
uses computational methods to evaluate alternative surgical options
prior to treatment, using patient-specific models of the vascular
system. The blood flow simulations enable a surgeon to see the 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.
Another
exhibit will feature research in modeling the Earth's atmosphere
that is being conducted at the Data Assimilation Office (DAO) at
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The NASA finite-volume
General Circulation Model (fvGCM) is the DAO's global atmospheric
modeling system (a numerical approximation of the fundamental physical,
dynamical and chemical processes of the atmosphere.)
The DAO strives for a unified climate, weather and chemistry transport
model, used in combination with real-world observations to produce
the best estimate of the true state of the Earth's atmosphere.
The NASA fvGCM combines community-based physical approximations
with numerical approximations to the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere
in order to predict the evolution of the Earth's weather and
climate. Researchers at the DAO apply the NASA fvGCM to high-resolution,
real-time weather forecasting problems in an effort to improve the
predictability of hurricanes and other atmospheric phenomena, in
addition to global climate prediction.
An
exhibit entitled "Estimating the Circulation and Climate of
the Ocean: the Circulation Pathway of Subtropical-Tropical Exchange"
features research being conducted at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. By combining satellite observations
and a state-of-the-art numerical model, a complete description of
the ocean is obtained for studying mechanisms of ocean circulation.
The
exhibit focuses on the circulation of the tropical Pacific Ocean
and illustrates the circuitous water mass pathways that connect
the subtropics and the tropics, and the vigorous mixing that occurs
along the way. The analysis allows researchers to "see through"
the ocean to monitor climate change and to help understand how water
circulates and interacts with its surroundings.
Another
NASA Ames exhibit will feature Cart3D, NASA's Software of the Year
2002. Cart3D is a software package for fully automating aerodynamic
simulations around complex flight vehicles, for example the complete
space shuttle with boosters and attachment hardware. The software
permits users with access to networked computing clusters or supercomputers
to synthetically generate the types of aerodynamic databases typically
obtained only through extensive wind-tunnel testing.
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. Aerodynamic databases from these and previously
computed analyses also will be available for playback and demonstration.
Get
details about NASA research showcased at the conference on the +NASA SC2002 website.
SC2002
is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Computer Society and by the Association for Computing Machinery's
Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture. +SC2002 Conference website.
-end-
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