HPCwire: NASA Showcases 'Green' Missions at SC09

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

HPCwire >> Topic >> Visualization

November 09, 2009

NASA Showcases 'Green' Missions at SC09

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif., Nov. 9 -- Five NASA centers join forces this month to showcase "green" science, engineering, and technology achievements at SC09, the leading international conference on high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis.

At this year's SC09 conference, scheduled Nov. 14–20, 2009, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Ore., the NASA exhibit features more than 45 demonstrations. Scientists will show how NASA is harnessing supercomputing power to better predict and understand the global influence of regional weather events, such as hurricanes, floods, and droughts. Also featured are demonstrations of NASA's modeling approach to help reduce harmful emissions from aircraft gas turbine engines, visualizations of galaxy mergers to help explain the evolution of the universe, and simulations to help design NASA's next-generation Ares V heavy-lift vehicle.

"Supercomputers play a critical role in NASA's commitment to helping solve the important environmental issues we face today" said Rupak Biswas, acting chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "These powerful systems allow scientists and engineers to produce accurate simulations and realistic visualizations that would otherwise not be possible. Combined with satellite observations and experimental data, these simulations support the agency's missions in science, aeronautics, exploration, and space operations."

The high-end computing operations at both the NAS facility at Ames and the NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., have recently been augmented to handle the ever-increasing need for computational resources, and in particular Earth science research.

In late October, NAS extended the Pleiades cluster with 9,216 cores (Intel Xeon 5500 series processors), which, along with architecture advances, will significantly improve the performance of many scientific codes. In September, NCCS added 8,192 cores to the Discover system, the first in a series of expansions dedicated to supporting climate research.

"Discover's faster processors enable more accurate and timely projections of changes in the Earth's environment," said Phil Webster, NCCS project manager and chief of the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "In support of climate science, Discover has been used to complete a re-analysis of 30 years of satellite observing system data to reconstruct a more accurate picture of the Earth's climate and weather -- NASA's most ambitious re-analysis to date. In the next year, Discover will host climate simulation runs contributing to the next major Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report."

This year's SC09 theme focuses on the environment and sustainability. NASA's Greenspace Initiative, led by Ames Research Center, supports environmental projects in aviation; global prediction monitoring and response; clean energy; and sustainable systems. In September, NASA Ames broke ground for what is expected to be the most environmentally friendly federal building ever. The agency's Columbia, Discover, and Pleiades systems are among the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world.

Demonstrations in NASA's exhibit (booth #1947) represent work by researchers at five NASA field centers: Ames Research Center; Goddard Space Flight Center; Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio; Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.; and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., in addition to various NASA university and corporate partners.

For more information about the NASA's SC09 exhibit, visit http://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC09/SC09.html and http://www.virtualpressoffice.com/kit/NASASC09.

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

For more information on NASA's Greenspace Initiative, visit http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/greenspace/.

-----

Source: NASA

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

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. 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.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

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