Improved design and simulation of aerospace vehicles and increased ability of scientists to model the Earth's climate and to forecast global environmental trends are NASA's strategic goals within the HPCC Program. These goals also include broadening the information applications of HPCC in areas complementary to NASA's expertise, and in areas important to the development of the National Information Infrastructure. To reach these goals, NASA participates in the development and use of the advanced high performance computing and communications systems and tools piloted in each of the five components of the HPCC Program.
Improved design and simulation of advanced aerospace vehicles at reduced cost will enable the U.S. to enhance its leadership in aerospace trade, especially as future aerospace vehicles become more difficult and expensive to simulate. In the HPCS component, NASA procures and evaluates prototype, scalable parallel computing systems used to develop advanced algorithms and software tools. This systematic approach is important for developing improved methodologies and software tools to model aerodynamics, aerobraking, heat transfer, combustion, and other engine elements through the full flight envelope of the aerospace vehicle (from vehicle takeoff, to flight at different altitudes and conditions, to landing).
Simulation of three-dimensional distribution of the Earth's ozone layer. Latitude and longitude slices illustrate the varying ozone content.
NASA's Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) project is developing multidisciplinary models of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena that will lead to more accurate environmental simulations. Challenges range from analysis of the interactions among Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land masses, to the reconstruction of planetary evolution. A crucial aspect of this program is the development of software management systems to handle the volumes of scientific data that will be produced late in this decade; multiple terabytes of data will be transmitted and stored each day and will rely on the high performance data management, storage systems, and communications systems developed through the HPCC Program.
NASA has established Grand Challenge applications interdisciplinary teams in Computational Aerosciences (CAS) and Earth and Space Sciences (ESS). The CAS teams are examining coupled aerodynamics, structures/materials, controls and combustion modeling for high- speed civil transport, high-performance aircraft, subsonic aircraft, and rotorcraft. Through a NASA Research Announcement, ESS teams have been established in Earth system science, space and solar- terrestrial physics, astronomy and astrophysics, biochemical life cycles, planetary evolutionary processors, and massive data analysis.
The CAS teams use the NASA Aeronautics Network (AERONet) while the ESS teams use the NASA Science Internet (NSINet) for high speed network connectivity among NASA, industry, and academic researchers (see map). In the future, these high performance network highways will be constructed from fast-packet network technology. NASA supports the architecture evolving in the NREN component and participates in the development and deployment of gigabit network technologies and architectures.
Pilot programs with the K-12 educational community have been established to discover the best mechanisms for using space and aeronautics assets to support educational communities in the U.S., and to provide practical models for using sophisticated computational and networking resources in these communities. This is to be accomplished in collaboration with Grand Challenge scientists from the CAS and ESS projects, thereby achieving direct involvement between NASA scientists and the K-12 community.
The NASA Aeronautics Network (AERONet) provides computer networking facilities to the aerospace community. NASA centers are linked via high speed communications lines, and lower-speed tail circuits connect other members of the aerospace community to NASA. In addition, AERONet also provides Internet access with many other networks, thereby increasing national and international network connectivity.
The NASA Science Internet (NSINet) provides connectivity among NASA, industry, and academic researchers to facilitate collaboration in Earth and space science research. This network builds on the Internet and includes technology to support the evolution of the Internet.
As lead agency in ASTA's software sharing activities, NASA coordinates the collection of and access to the software base developed in the HPCC Program. The goal of the HPCC Software Exchange is to facilitate the exchange and reuse of software. Its specific objectives are to 1) develop and demonstrate distributed architectures and enabling technologies that support software exchange, 2) implement an initial distributed HPCC Software Exchange that satisfies the needs of the HPCC Program, and 3) specify an open non-proprietary architecture that will facilitate the emergence of a national software exchange.
NASA is committed to broadening its participation in key areas of research and development of prototype solutions to National Challenge applications. NASA is selectively augmenting on-going programs that can contribute to an early start-up of these prototype systems in applications such as education and lifelong learning, digital library technology, manufacturing and industrial design, and access to widely available databases of Earth and space science data. NASA participates in each of the four IITA elements.
NASA's BRHR component fosters research into new theory and application of high performance computing. These activities will leverage current research efforts in high performance computing at NASA research institutes and universities.
NASA played an active role in the Consortium during its first year of operation. Use of the Consortium's Intel Touchstone Delta supercomputer has enabled major advances in several scientific and engineering applications including the processing of three- dimensional images of Venus taken by the Magellan satellite at the rate of four frames per second Ð thus putting real-time image processing within reach. Other accomplishments on the Delta include the largest direct numerical simulation of the time-dependent compressible Navier-Stokes equations and the largest three- dimensional compressible turbulence simulations for high Reynolds numbers.
Simulated temperature profile for a three-dimensional hypersonic re-entry body traveling at an altitude of 100 kilometers, a speed of Mach 24, and an angle of attack of 10 degrees. Performed on the Intel Touchstone Delta at CSCC, the simulation employed 70 million particles and all 512 of the Delta's processors running for 50 minutes.
NASA continues to develop and deploy advanced networking technologies to allow researchers and educators to carry out collaborative research and educational activities. NASA has entered into a cooperative effort with DOE to procure network services that will operate at 45 Mb/s using synchronous optical fiber network standards. The two agencies are working closely to provide a nationwide fiber optic network that will meet HPCC research communications needs and serve as the foundation for even faster networks ranging from 155 Mb/s to eventual gigabit speeds.
NASA's Ames Research center has ported single discipline computational fluid dynamics code to a number of scalable parallel computers. The objective is to perform multidisciplinary optimization of a High Speed Civil Transport vehicle and the takeoff and landing of a simple powered lift vehicle (described in the Case Studies section). The optimization will consider aerodynamic efficiency, structural weight, and propulsion system performance. The multidisciplinary analysis will be performed by solving the governing equations for each discipline concurrently on a parallel computer. Developing scalable algorithms for the solution of this problem will also be central to demonstrating the potential for teraflops execution speed on a massively parallel computer.
NASA's Langley Research center is working to improve the processes for the design and analysis of HSCT using advanced computational fluid dynamics and structural analyses. A set of highly optimized software tools has been created that can be used to implement irregular computations on massively parallel machines. These tools can be used both manually by users and by distributed memory compilers to automatically parallelize irregular codes.
The surface pressure distribution on a High Speed Civil Transport aircraft is simulated using an Intel iPSC/860 high performance computer with 32 processors. Areas of highest pressure are in red, areas of lowest pressure are dark violet.
NASA's Ames Research center has developed and demonstrated the ENSAERO computer algorithm, which couples aerodynamics and structures analysis modules on the Intel iPSC/860 massively parallel computer.
Results involve the coupling of a low-fidelity structures code to a high-fidelity aerodynamics analysis routine. This multidisciplinary research, in conjunction with the increased performance offered by massively parallel computers, will enhance the ability of aircraft manufacturers to quickly analyze different design options and accelerate the prototyping process, and thereby reduce design cycle costs in addition to producing vehicles with improved performance.
Computational fluid dynamics reveals the interaction between the freestream airflow and engine exhaust of a YAV-8B Harrier Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft. The simulation shows how hot gas from the nozzles is ingested by the engines, reducing their effectiveness.
This consortium of U.S. industrial firms works with NASA to facilitate the development of precompetitive software for the implementation of integrated multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization systems on heterogeneous computer networks. Incorporation of these systems into the product development process can increase U.S. competitiveness through reduced design cycle time and life cycle costs and increased quality of technology-driven products. Consortium members include:
The inherent size and complexity of HPCC problems will increase the cost and difficulty of developing and maintaining robust applications software. The HPCC Software Exchange Experiment encourages the sharing and reuse of software modules by providing an infrastructure of interconnected software repositories. The HPCC Software Exchange Experiment System represents the first time that a number of different agencies with different philosophies for software management have collaborated to develop an integrated, albeit experimental, system.
The second phase of development, the HPCC Software Exchange Prototype System, was begun in FY 1993. This phase includes the development of 1) an HPCC Software Standards database with initial software submission standards, 2) an HPCC Repository Directory with additional software repositories, 3) an HPCC Union Catalogue populated with mathematical and statistical software packages and programs, 4) a Mathematical and Statistical Software Cross-index, and 5) a Unix-to-Unix client/server system for uniform repository access.