2006 NEWS AND HIGHLIGHTS
NASA Awards Massive Supercomputing Time to Advance Climate, Materials, and Energy Research
NASA has awarded a total of 4.65 million hours of supercomputing time to enable researchers in government labs, universities, and industry to tackle some of the most challenging research problems of our time.
Awards went to U.S. scientists whose projects seek to advance our understanding of climate variability, dense suspensions, ultra-lean combustion burners, and novel electronic materials. The projects will receive large allocations of time on Columbia, one of the largest and most productive supercomputers in existence, operated by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center (ARC) in California's Silicon Valley. The NLCS projects will run on the 2,048-processor shared memory environment within the 10,240-processor Columbia system.
The allocations of computing time are made under NASA's new National Leadership Computing System (NLCS) initiative, which was chartered to provide resources to computationally intensive research projects in the national interest.
The four NLCS projects receiving one-year awards in 2006 are:
"A Cloud-resolving Tropical Simulation for Studying Scale-Interactions and Hurricane Variability," led by Dr. Greg Holland, National Center for Atmospheric Research. This project was awarded 0.95 million processor-hours to simulate weather at high, cloud-resolving resolution to determine how moist convection impacts natural climate change, such as hurricane frequency and intensity. This will provide objective information on future hurricane impacts, leading to much improved understanding of how climate both influences, and is influenced by, human activities.
"Modeling the Rheological Properties of Suspensions: Application to Cement Based Materials," led by Dr. William George, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This project was awarded 1 million processor-hours to study the flow, dispersion, and merging of dense suspensions, such as cement-based materials like concrete, composed of rigid bodies having a wide range of sizes and shapes under a variety of flow conditions. Understanding these mechanisms also remains a challenge in industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to coatings.
"Interaction of Turbulence and Chemistry in Lean Premixed Combustion," led by Dr. Marcus Day, Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This project was awarded 1.8 million processor-hours to investigate the dynamics of ultra-lean, turbulent, premixed burners incorporating detailed chemistry and transport for a variety of fuels. The resulting knowledge can accelerate the development of new gaseous burners, which have the potential to dramatically reduce emissions in transportation systems, heat generation, and power generation.
"Massively Parallel Approach to the Nonlinear Response of a Mott Insulator," led by Prof. James Freericks, Georgetown University. This project was awarded 0.9 million processor-hours to derive an exact description of the nonlinear response of Mott insulators, a class of materials expected to conduct electricity, but which transitions from metal to insulator as the applied electric field changes. The ability to accurately model such strongly correlated materials, which have electronic properties that can change dramatically with pressure, temperature, or other conditions, could also advance our understanding of high temperature superconductors, rare-earth magnets, and others useful electronic materials.
The NLCS initiative demonstrates NASA's support for important national priorities. In 2004, the U.S. High-End Computing Revitalization Task Force recommended that federal agencies provide access to "shared leadership systems" for the largest, most computationally intensive scientific endeavors. By inviting industry and academia participation, NASA can help advance U.S. technology and education, and assist U.S. competitiveness. In return for NLCS awards, much of the resulting knowledge will be made publicly available.
More information:
+ Columbia supercomputer
+ NLCS call for proposals (closed Jan. 16, 2006)
+ NASA press release on 2006 NLCS award
|
|
|
|
 NEWS ARCHIVE
|
