Papers & Reports 2007
High-End Computing at NASA: Highlights of Science and Engineering Achievements on NASA's Supercomputers During the Past 18 Months
In this report, you will read about the technologies that help make NASA’s HEC Program successful. As described in the Program Overview, our user community encompasses more than 1,000 researchers from NASA field centers, government laboratories, academia, and industry across the United States.
High-End Computing at NASA: Highlights of Science and Engineering Achievements on NASA's Supercomputers During the Past 18 Months,NAS Technical Report, NAS-07-001, January 2007.
Concurrent Visualization in a Production Supercomputing Environment
We describe a concurrent visualization pipeline designed for operation in a production supercomputing environment. The facility was initially developed on the NASA Ames “Columbia” supercomputer for a massively parallel forecast model (GEOS4). During the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, GEOS4 was run 4 times a day under tight time constraints so that its output could be included in an ensemble prediction that was made available to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center.
Concurrent Visualization in a Production Supercomputing Environment,NAS Technical Report, NAS-07-002, January 2007.
Parallel I/O Performance Characterization of Columbia and NEC SX-8 Superclusters
We undertook a study to characterize the parallel I/O performance of two of today’s leading parallel supercomputers: the Columbia system at NASA Ames Research Center and the NEC SX-8 supercluster at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
Parallel I/O Performance Characterization of Columbia and NEC SX-8 Superclusters,NAS Technical Report, NAS-07-003, April 2007.
Hemisphere Ice Ball Debris-Transport Analysis
This report documents the analysis used to determine the maximum allowable ice-ball size on the External Tank of the Space Shuttle Launch Vehicle. The maximum allowable size is determined by computing the debris transport of millions of possible ice-ball trajectories and computing over five billion possible impacts on the Orbiter, and comparing those impacts with the capability of impacted component.
Hemisphere Ice Ball Debris-Transport Analysis,NAS Technical Report, NAS-07-004, June 2007.
3DGRAPE/AL: A Case Study of Parallelization
3DGRAPE/AL is a program for generating structured, three-dimensional computational grids used in modeling fluid flow near a solid boundary. These grids are based on a set of elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs), and the program requires that the values of first cell sizes and angles of incidence of the grid lines be specified near a boundary.
3DGRAPE/AL: A Case Study of Parallelization,NAS Technical Report, NAS-07-005, July 2007.
Anharmonic Vibrational Spectroscopy Calculations with Electronic Structure Potentials: Comparison of MP2 and DFT for Organic Molecules
Density Functional Theory (DFT) technique is the most commonly used approach when it comes to computation of vibrational spectra of molecular species. In this study we compare anharmonic spectra of several organic molecules such as allene, propyne, glycine, and imidazole, computed from ab initio MP2 potentials and DFT potentials based on commonly used BLYP and B3LYP functionals.
Anharmonic Vibrational Spectroscopy Calculations with Electronic Structure Potentials: Comparison of MP2 and DFT for Organic Molecules,NAS Technical Report, NAS-07-006, August 2007.
Testing Parallel Linear Iterative Solvers for Finite Element Groundwater Flow Problems
This paper tests 12 Krylov subspace parallel linear iterative solvers with 5 preconditioners (60 scenarios) on linear systems of equations resulting from a finite element study of remediation of a military site using pump-and-treat technology. Both symmetric, positivedefinite matrices, resulting from a Picard linearization of the nonlinear equations for the steady-state case, and nonsymmetric matrices, arising from a Newton linearization of the nonlinear equations of a transient case, are studied.
Testing Parallel Linear Iterative Solvers for Finite Element Groundwater Flow Problems,NAS Technical Report, NAS-07-007, September 2007.
Performance Evaluation of Supercomputers using HPCC and IMB Benchmarks
The HPC Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite and the Intel MPI Benchmark (IMB) are used to compare and evaluate the combined performance of processor, memory subsystem and interconnect fabric of five leading supercomputers - SGI Altix BX2, Cray X1, Cray Opteron Cluster, Dell Xeon cluster, and NEC SX-8.
Performance Evaluation of Supercomputers using HPCC and IMB Benchmarks,NAS Technical Report, NAS-07-008, October 2007.
Performance Evaluation of a Multi-Zone Application in Different OpenMP Approaches
We describe a performance study of a multi-zone application benchmark implemented in several OpenMP approaches that exploit multi-level parallelism and deal with unbalanced workload. The multi-zone application was derived from the well-known NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) suite that involves flow solvers on collections of loosely coupled discretization meshes.
Performance Evaluation of a Multi-Zone Application in Different OpenMP Approaches,NAS Technical Report, NAS-07-009, October 2007.
