News 2012
Where No Musician Has Gone Before
Combining magnetic field data collected by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft with computer modeling techniques to reproduce the sounds of ancient musical instruments, Domenico Vicinanza and the ASTRA project created music played in the NASA booth at the international supercomputing conference (SC12) in November.
Revolutionizing Rotorcraft Design with CFD
NAS Division fundamental aeronautics researcher Neal Chaderjian is developing physics-based CFD tools to enhance the predictive accuracy of rotocraft flow fields.
NASA Missions Featured at Supercomputing Conference
Some of NASA's most exciting achievements are being showcased at the 25th international Supercomputing Conference (SC12), scheduled Nov. 10-16, 2012 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Highlighted accomplishments include the orchestration of the perfect Mars Curiosity rover landing, the Kepler mission's discovery of new planets in the Milky Way galaxy, advances in our understanding of Earth's weather and climate through high-resolution three-dimensional models, and the complex engineering calculations behind the next-generation Space Launch System. Visit NASA SC12 Website
Read more about NASA's exhibit at the Supercomputing Conference
NASA Computer Model Shows a Disk Galaxy's Life History
A cosmological simulation run on the Pleiades supercomputer (using more than a million CPU hours) shows the development of a disk galaxy over 13.5 billion years from shortly after the Big Bang to the present.
The Cosmological Supercomputer
The Bolshoi simulation evolves the universe all over again using 14,000 central processing units on NASA's Pleiades supercomputer.
Simulations Uncover ‘Flashy’ Secrets of Merging Black Holes
Einstein theorized that massive objects produce gravity distortions when they interact. Astronomers have so far found only indirect evidence of these disturbances, but some think that this discovery is just a few years away.
SMD Time Requests Due September 20; ARMD Time Requests due October 5
The Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) will select from requests submitted to the e-Books online system by September 20 and October 5 (respectively) for 1-year allocation awards beginning November 1. Any current projects set to expire on October 31 must have a request in e-Books to be considered for renewal.
In the Land of the Computer, Pleiades is King
NASA's flagship supercomputer, Pleiades, is the fourth most powerful system in the US. NBC Bay Area reporter Garvin Thomas goes backstage to get up-close-and-personal with Pleiades, which is critical to NASA scientists and engineers for missions on Earth and in space.
NAS Engineers Improve Efficiency of the National Combustion Code on Pleiades
Software engineers from the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division, with assistance from counterparts at NASA Glenn Research Center, have improved the parallel performance of the National Combustion Code (NCC) by up to 60 percent when run on the Pleiades supercomputer.
New NASA Supercomputer Facility Set to Advance Earth Research
NASA soon will open a new chapter of discovery using enhanced Landsat Earth-observing data in a state-of-the-art, high-performance computing and data access facility called NASA Earth Exchange (NEX).
NAS Engineers Design Innovative Sonic Boom Measurement Technology
Aeronautics experts in the NAS Division have collaborated with other NASA organizations and Lockheed Martin to design an innovative apparatus to increase the accuracy of sonic boom measurements in future wind tunnel tests.
NASA'S Pleiades Supercomputer Gets A Little More Oomph
NASA's flagship Pleiades supercomputer just received a boost to help keep pace with the intensive number-crunching requirements of scientists and engineers working on some of the agency's most challenging missions.
NASA Scientists Find History of Asteroid Impacts in Earth Rocks
Research by NASA and international scientists concludes giant asteroids, similar or larger than the one believed to have killed the dinosaurs, hit Earth billions of years ago with more frequency than previously thought. Computer models of the ancient main asteroid belt ran at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division.
NASA Views Our Perpetual Ocean
Tens of thousands of ocean currents are captured in a new scientific visualization created by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center from model-data syntheses made possible by high-end computing resources at the NAS facility.
Pleiades Upgrade Recognized by Exclusive Judging Panel
NASA industry partner SGI announced today that IDG's Computerworld Honors® Program has named the company a 2012 Laureate. The recognition is based on SGI's work with NASA and the Pleiades supercomputer installed at the NAS facility to support missions ranging from climate simulation to launch vehicle design.
Engineers Enlist Weather Model to Optimize Offshore Wind Plan
Using a sophisticated weather model, environmental engineers at Stanford University have defined optimal placement of a grid of four wind farms off the U.S. East Coast. The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division provided access to computational resources.
NAS Networking Flow Tool Whitepaper Now Available
In a just-released white paper, NAS network engineers describe a method for tracking, analyzing, and managing network traffic from multiple sources to increase end-to-end data transfer rates.
Petaflop Computing for the Masses
In this podcast, NAS Engineering Branch Chief Bill Thigpen joins industry partners to describe NASA's high-performance computing requirements and explain how the Pleiades supercomputer helps enable scientific and engineering breakthroughs.
NASA Scales SGI Pleiades InfiniBand Cluster for Space Weather Simulations
With over 60 miles of InfiniBand cabling in place at the NAS facility, a scientist was able to utilize 25,000 SGI® ICE™ Intel® Xeon® processor cores on the Pleiades supercomputer to better understand the physics of space weather.
Kepler Mission Discovers First Earth-size Planets Beyond Our Solar System
With help from the Pleiades supercomputer and NAS experts, scientists have validated the discovery of two new planets, Kepler–20e and Kepler–20f. The discovery is detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature, with NAS's Chris Henze as a coauthor. Read the paper in Nature.
