HPCwire: NASA Showcases Science at SC08

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

November 07, 2008

NASA Showcases Science at SC08

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif., Nov. 7 -- NASA will highlight some of its most inspiring science and engineering achievements at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC08), at the Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas, Nov. 15-21, 2008.

At NASA's SC08 research exhibit, scientists and engineers will be on hand to explain more than 40 projects supporting some of NASA's most critical mission work -- all made possible by the agency's powerful high-end computing (HEC) resources. Featured are presentations about how NASA is advancing the ability to predict tropical storms to help reduce loss of lives and property, and working to design the thermal protection system for America's next-generation spacecraft, the Orion crew exploration vehicle (CEV). The exhibit also highlights innovative computational methods to reduce the sound from jet engines -- a source of noise pollution for the public and potentially hazardous operating conditions for pilots.

"NASA's high-performance computers are critical for the accurate simulations needed to support safe engineering designs for the Ares launch vehicles, and the CEV and launch abort system," said Rupak Biswas, acting chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "With a new generation of supercomputers now in place, NASA is planning even more significant extensions to its high-end computing resources in the coming years to meet the continuing surge in computational requirements," Biswas said.

The computational infrastructure at Ames was recently expanded to include Pleiades, a 47,104 processor core SGI Altix ICE system to augment the Columbia supercomputer in supporting NASA's four key mission areas. In addition, the NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., has nearly tripled the performance of its Discover cluster to 67 trillion calculations per second (teraflops) with the addition of an IBM iDataPlex system containing 4,096 processor cores. The expanded Discover will enable high-resolution modeling of climate, weather, solar activity, and astrophysical phenomena.

"Discover can now provide NASA researchers with even more critical computing power needed for current and future NASA Earth and space science studies," said Phil Webster, NCCS project manager and chief of the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Conference participants will also see captivating images and videos generated using NASA computer data models and simulation results, shown on the nine-screen "mini-hyperwall," a traveling version of the recently installed hyperwall-2 visualization system.

NASA's exhibit (booth #1343) represents work supporting all four of the agency's mission directorates -- aeronautics, exploration systems, science, and space operations. This work is conducted by researchers at six NASA field centers: Ames Research Center; Goddard Space Flight Center; Glenn Research Center, Cleveland; Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.; Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.; and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. -- in addition to various NASA research partners. The conference is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and by the Association for Computing Machinery.

For more information about the NASA's SC08 exhibit, visit http://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC08/SC08.html.

For more information about the SC08 conference, visit http://sc08.supercomputing.org/.

For information about NASA's High-End Computing Program, visit http://www.hec.nasa.gov/.

-----

Source: NASA Ames Research Center

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html