News From the Conference

NASA Receives Six HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards at SC17

11.14.17

NASA teams were honored with six HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards at the international SC17 conference in Denver. HPCwire conducts the awards program each year to recognize the best and the brightest high-performance computing (HPC) projects and developments over the previous 12 months. The awards are nominated and voted on by the global HPC community.

Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, Inc. publisher of HPCwire, presented the 2017 awards. NASA received the following awards:

• Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences
  NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) with Ames Research Center performed first-ever simulations using StellarBox to simulate surface dynamics.

  

  Researchers in the NAS Division ran their 3D radiative magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) code, StellarBox, on NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer to simulate the challenging surface dynamics of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system. The simulations will provide new understanding about the suitability of planets circling red dwarf stars for developing and sustaining life—and specifically, will help scientists assess the possibility of life in the Proxima Centauri system.

  For more information about Stellarbox, see our SC17 demonstration, Supercomputing Stars, and the Heliophysics Modeling & Simulation Project website.

• Top Energy-Efficient HPC Achievement
  NASA saves energy and water with new modular supercomputing facility

  

  NASA’s Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF) is an innovative concept to greatly reduce the agency’s environmental impact. The first two MSF modules were launched this year at the NAS facility. The MSF will save about 1,300,000 gallons of water per year—reducing annual water usage by over 99%. It will also save a million kilowatt-hours of energy each year; initial results show a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.03 (the computer industry standard is 1.7). Electra, the HPC system contained in the MSF, will provide an additional 280 million compute hours annually to U.S. scientists and engineers running simulations for NASA missions.

  For more information about Electra and the MSF, see the SC17 demonstration, NASA Blazes a Different Path to Energy-Efficient Supercomputing.

• Best HPC Visualization Product or Technology
  NASA Hyperwall Visualization Tool for exploring petascale ocean circulation data

  

  A team at the NAS facility developed a new visualization tool that allows scientists to interactively explore 5 petabytes of ocean circulation model output on NASA’s 245-million-pixel hyperwall display. This tool is transforming the way ocean scientists study the global ocean circulation, allowing them to discover hidden processes that are taking place in the numerical simulation and to determine their causes. Multimedia compression techniques cut the data requirement by a factor of 6 to enable the interactive visualization. The tool is also being applied to solar research and will be useful for exploring other large datasets for NASA missions.

  For more information about how researchers are using this innovative tool, see the SC17 demonstrations, Scientists Explore Ocean Currents Through Petascale Simulations and Visualization and Interactive Exploration of Solar Magnetic Field Lines.

• Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement
  Predictive Science & NASA for prediction of the corona for the Aug. 21, 2017 total solar eclipse

  

  By using state-of-the-art modeling and computational techniques, scientists were able to predict how the Sun’s corona would look during the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse. This successful prediction represents one of the largest and most ambitious global corona simulations to date, and was used for observational planning purposes prior to the eclipse by some NASA-involved experiments. Developing and validating models like these is important for understanding the structure and physics of the corona, which is critical for forecasting space weather and solar storms that can damage infrastructure.

  For more information about this work, see the SC17 demonstration, Totality! Predicting the Corona of the 2017 Great American Solar Eclipse.

• Top Supercomputing Achievement
  HPE and NASA deploy first commodity HPC system into space

  

  Teams from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NASA worked together to successfully deploy a one-teraflop supercomputer on the International Space Station (ISS). This exciting project tests the feasibility of running supercomputers in a sustained space environment without needing to develop specialized radiation shielding and power systems, which can delay use of the latest technologies. The Spaceborne Computer features a new enclosure with integrated cooling and power distribution, and software that mitigates environmentally induced errors, enabling commercial off-the-shelf nodes to function flawlessly on the ISS and laying the foundation for using HPC in long-term space exploration missions.

  For more information, see High Performance Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Computer System on the ISS and HPE and NASA Join Forces to Implement the First Spaceborne Computer.

NASA also received the Readers’ Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in the Cloud for Boom Supersonic uses Rescale’s ScaleX cloud HPC platform and NASA simulation tools to design supersonic passenger jet. NASA’s Cart3D and FUN3D computational fluid dynamics software packages are used for Boom Technology’s supersonic demonstrator simulations to help design a supersonic passenger jet that produces a low rumble, instead of a loud boom, when it breaks the sound barrier.