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NASA NTRS2000

Automatic Data Distribution for CFD Applications on Structured Grids

Data distribution is an important step in implementation of any parallel algorithm. The data distribution determines data traffic, utilization of the interconnection network and affects the overall code efficiency. In recent years a number data distribution methods have been developed and used in real programs for improving data traffic. We use some of the methods for translating data dependence and affinity relations into data distribution directives. We describe an automatic data alignment and placement tool (ADAFT) which implements these methods and show it results for some CFD codes (NPB and ARC3D). Algorithms for program analysis and derivation of data distribution implemented in ADAFT are efficient three pass algorithms. Most algorithms have linear complexity with the exception of some graph algorithms having complexity O(n(sup 4)) in the worst case.

Frumkin, Michael↗

NASA NTRS2000

Forced Boundary-Layer Transition on X-43 (Hyper-X) in NASA LaRC 20-Inch Mach 6 Air Tunnel

Aeroheating and boundary layer transition characteristics for the X-43 (Hyper-X) configuration have been experimentally examined in the Langley 20-Inch Mach 6 Air Tunnel. Global surface heat transfer distributions, and surface streamline patterns were measured on a 0.333-scale model of the Hyper-X forebody. Parametric variations include angles-of-attack of 0-deg, 2-deg, and 4-deg; Reynolds numbers based on model length of 1.2 to 15.4 million; and inlet cowl door both open and closed. The effects of discrete roughness elements on the forebody boundary layer, which included variations in trip configuration and height, were investigated. This document is intended to serve as a release of preliminary data to the Hyper-X program; analysis is limited to observations of the experimental trends in order to expedite dissemination.

Berry, Scott A.↗

NASA NTRS2000

Forced Boundary-Layer Transition on X-43 (Hyper-X) in NASA LaRC 31-Inch Mach 10 Air Tunnel

Aeroheating and boundary layer transition characteristics for the X-43 (Hyper-X) configuration have been experimentally examined in the Langley 31-Inch Mach 10 Air Tunnel. Global surface heat transfer distributions, and surface streamline patterns were measured on a 0.333-scale model of the Hyper-X forebody. Parametric variations include angles-of-attack of 0-deg, 2-deg, 3-deg, and 4-deg; Reynolds numbers based on model length of 1.2 to 5.1 million; and inlet cowl door both open and closed. The effects of discrete roughness elements on the forebody boundary layer, which included variations in trip configuration and height, were investigated. This document is intended to serve as a release of preliminary data to the Hyper-X program; analysis is limited to observations of the experimental trends in order to expedite dissemination.

Berry, Scott A.↗

NASA NTRS2000

Effect of Discontinuities and Uncertainties on the Response and Failure of Composite Structures

The overall goal of this research was to assess the effect of discontinuities and uncertainties on the nonlinear response and failure of composite structures subjected to combined mechanical and thermal loads. The four key elements of the study were: (1) development of simple and efficient procedures for the accurate determination of transverse shear and transverse normal stresses in structural sandwiches as well as in unstiffened and stiffened composite panels and shells; (2) study the effects of transverse stresses on the response, damage initiation and propagation in composite and sandwich structures; (3) use of hierarchical sensitivity coefficients to identify the major parameters that affect the response and damage in each of the different levels in the hierarchy (micro-mechanical, layer, panel, subcomponent and component levels); and (4) application of fuzzy set techniques to identify the range and variation of possible responses. The computational models developed were used in conjunction with experiments, to understand the physical phenomena associated with the nonlinear response and failure of composite and sandwich structures. A toolkit was developed for use in conjunction with deterministic analysis programs to help the designer in assessing the effect of uncertainties in the different computational model parameters on the variability of the response quantities.

Noor, Ahmed K.↗

NASA NTRS2000

A Miniature Mars Ascent Vehicle

Launch of payloads from the surface of the Mars is a central element in any Sample Return program, and represents one of the most important objectives of NASA planetary science and Human Exploration and Development of Space (HEDS) programs. Analysis of these samples in the sophisticated laboratories of Earth will give vastly more scientific as well as HEDS-relevant engineering and space-medicine knowledge of those bodies than can be performed from any feasible near-term miniaturized instruments. What is proposed here is a launch system with no moving parts of any kind: no gyroscope, no accelerometers, no control surfaces, and no thrust vector control.

B. H. Wilcox↗

NASA NTRS2001

Funtools: Fits Users Need Tools for Quick, Quantitative Analysis

The Funtools project arose out of conversations with astronomers about the decline in their software development efforts over the past decade. A stated reason for this decline is that it takes too much effort to master one of the existing FITS libraries simply in order to write a few analysis programs. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that astronomers typically develop new programs only occasionally, and the long interval between coding efforts often necessitates re-learning the FITS interfaces. We therefore set ourselves the goal of developing a minimal buy-in FITS library for researchers who are occasional (but serious) coders. In this case, "minimal buy-in" meant "easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to re-learn next month". Based on conversations with astronomers interested in writing code, we concluded that this goal could be achieved by emphasizing two essential capabilities. The first was the ability to write FITS programs without knowing much about FITS, i.e., without having to deal with the arcane rules for generating a properly formatted FITS file. The second was to support the use of already-familiar C/Unix facilities, especially C structs and Unix stdio. Taken together, these two capabilities would allow researchers to leverage their existing programming expertise while minimizing the need to learn new and complex coding rules.

Mandel, Eric↗

NASA NTRS2001

Obtaining Reliable Predictions of Terrestrial Energy Coupling From Real-Time Solar Wind Measurement

The first draft of a manuscript titled "Variable time delays in the propagation of the interplanetary magnetic field" has been completed, for submission to the Journal of Geophysical Research. In the preparation of this manuscript all data and analysis programs had been updated to the highest temporal resolution possible, at 16 seconds or better. The program which computes the "measured" IMF propagation time delays from these data has also undergone another improvement. In another significant development, a technique has been developed in order to predict IMF phase plane orientations, and the resulting time delays, using only measurements from a single satellite at L1. The "minimum variance" method is used for this computation. Further work will be done on optimizing the choice of several parameters for the minimum variance calculation.

Weimer, Daniel R.↗

NASA NTRS2002

On Determination of 3D Morphology and Plasma Properties of the Solar Corona

An earlier analysis preformed and published will be revisited and applied to SECCHI's observations. Using coronal models and imaging-rendering techniques we will investigate several important facts regarding the solar stereographic mission. A synthesized image will be presented formed from integrating the emission from the volume elements along the line-of-sight path through a three-dimensional volume. We used analysis of pairs of these synthesized images with various angular perspectives to investigate the effect of angular separation on mission objectives. The resulting images and analysis provide guidelines for developing a stereographic mission analysis program.

Gary, G. Allen↗

NASA NTRS1997

By Hand or Not By-Hand: A Case Study of Alternative Approaches to Parallelize CFD Applications

While parallel processing promises to speed up applications by several orders of magnitude, the performance achieved still depends upon several factors, including the multiprocessor architecture, system software, data distribution and alignment, as well as the methods used for partitioning the application and mapping its components onto the architecture. The existence of the Gorden Bell Prize given out at Supercomputing every year suggests that while good performance can be attained for real applications on general purpose multiprocessors, the large investment in man-power and time still has to be repeated for each application-machine combination. As applications and machine architectures become more complex, the cost and time-delays for obtaining performance by hand will become prohibitive. Computer users today can turn to three possible avenues for help: parallel libraries, parallel languages and compilers, interactive parallelization tools. The success of these methodologies, in turn, depends on proper application of data dependency analysis, program structure recognition and transformation, performance prediction as well as exploitation of user supplied knowledge. NASA has been developing multidisciplinary applications on highly parallel architectures under the High Performance Computing and Communications Program. Over the past six years, the transition of underlying hardware and system software have forced the scientists to spend a large effort to migrate and recede their applications. Various attempts to exploit software tools to automate the parallelization process have not produced favorable results. In this paper, we report our most recent experience with CAPTOOL, a package developed at Greenwich University. We have chosen CAPTOOL for three reasons: 1. CAPTOOL accepts a FORTRAN 77 program as input. This suggests its potential applicability to a large collection of legacy codes currently in use. 2. CAPTOOL employs domain decomposition to obtain parallelism. Although the fact that not all kinds of parallelism are handled may seem unappealing, many NASA applications in computational aerosciences as well as earth and space sciences are amenable to domain decomposition. 3. CAPTOOL generates code for a large variety of environments employed across NASA centers: MPI/PVM on network of workstations to the IBS/SP2 and CRAY/T3D.

Yan, Jerry C.↗

NASA NTRS2002

Mars Radar Observations with the Goldstone Solar System Radar

The Goldstone Solar System Radar (GSSR) has successfully collected radar echo data from Mars over the past 30 years. As such, the GSSR has played a role as a specific mission element within Mars exploration. The older data provided local elevation information for Mars, along with radar scattering information with global resolution. Since the upgrade to the 70-m Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna at Goldstone completed in 1986, Mars data has been collected during all but the 1997 Mars opposition. Radar data, and non-imaging delay-Doppler data in particular, requires significant data processing to extract elevation, reflectivity and roughness of the reflecting surface. The spatial resolution of these experiments is typically some 20 km in longitude by some 150 km in latitude. The interpretation of these parameters while limited by the complexities of electromagnetic scattering, do provide information directly relevant to geophysical and geomorphic analyses of Mars. The usefulness of radar data for Mars exploration has been demonstrated in the past. Radar data were critical in assessing the Viking Lander 1 site as well as, more recently, the Pathfinder landing site. In general, radar data have not been available to the Mars exploration community at large. A project funded initially by the Mars Exploration Directorate Science Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and later funded by NASA's Mars Data Analysis Program has reprocessed to a common format a decade's worth of raw GSSR Mars delay-Doppler data in aid of landing site characterization for the Mars Program. These data will soon be submitted to the Planetary Data System (PDS). The radar data used were obtained between 1988 and 1995 by the GSSR, and comprise some 63 delay-Doppler radar tracks. Of these, 15 have yet to be recovered from old 9-track tapes, and some of the data may be permanently lost.

Haldemann, A. F. C.↗

NASA NTRS1997

Structural Analysis and Design Software

Collier Research and Development Corporation received a one-of-a-kind computer code for designing exotic hypersonic aircraft called ST-SIZE in the first ever Langley Research Center software copyright license agreement. Collier transformed the NASA computer code into a commercial software package called HyperSizer, which integrates with other Finite Element Modeling and Finite Analysis private-sector structural analysis program. ST-SIZE was chiefly conceived as a means to improve and speed the structural design of a future aerospace plane for Langley Hypersonic Vehicles Office. Including the NASA computer code into HyperSizer has enabled the company to also apply the software to applications other than aerospace, including improved design and construction for offices, marine structures, cargo containers, commercial and military aircraft, rail cars, and a host of everyday consumer products.

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NASA NTRS2002

Quick Fix for Managing Risks

Under a Phase II SBIR contract, Kennedy and Lumina Decision Systems, Inc., jointly developed the Schedule and Cost Risk Analysis Modeling (SCRAM) system, based on a version of Lumina's flagship software product, Analytica(R). Acclaimed as "the best single decision-analysis program yet produced" by MacWorld magazine, Analytica is a "visual" tool used in decision-making environments worldwide to build, revise, and present business models, minus the time-consuming difficulty commonly associated with spreadsheets. With Analytica as their platform, Kennedy and Lumina created the SCRAM system in response to NASA's need to identify the importance of major delays in Shuttle ground processing, a critical function in project management and process improvement. As part of the SCRAM development project, Lumina designed a version of Analytica called the Analytica Design Engine (ADE) that can be easily incorporated into larger software systems. ADE was commercialized and utilized in many other developments, including web-based decision support.

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NASA NTRS2002

Flutter Analysis of a Transonic Fan

This paper describes the calculation of flutter stability characteristics for a transonic forward swept fan configuration using a viscous aeroelastic analysis program. Unsteady Navier-Stokes equations are solved on a dynamically deforming, body fitted, grid to obtain the aeroelastic characteristics using the energy exchange method. The non-zero inter-blade phase angle is modeled using phase-lagged boundary conditions. Results obtained show good correlation with measurements. It is found that the location of shock and variation of shock strength strongly influenced stability. Also, outboard stations primarily contributed to stability characteristics. Results demonstrate that changes in blade shape impact the calculated aerodynamic damping, indicating importance of using accurate blade operating shape under centrifugal and steady aerodynamic loading for flutter prediction. It was found that the calculated aerodynamic damping was relatively insensitive to variation in natural frequency.

Srivastava, R.↗

NASA NTRS1991

NASA's Software Bank (ASAP)

The NASA-developed Artificial Satellite Analysis Program (ASAP), was purchased from COSMIC and used to enhance OPNET, a program for developing simulations of communications satellite networks. OPNET's developer, MIL3, applied ASAP to support predictions of low Earth orbit, enabling the company to offer satellite modeling capability to customers earlier than if they had to actually develop the program.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS2002

Nonlinear and Failure Analysis of Composite Structures

The overall goal of this research is to assess the effect of discontinuities and uncertainties on the nonlinear response and failure of stiffened composite panels subjected to combined mechanical and thermal loads. The key elements of the study are: (a) study of the effects of stiffener geometry and of transverse stresses on the response, damage initiation and propagation in stiffened composite panels; (b) use of hierarchical sensitivity coefficients to identify the major parameters that affect the response and damage in each of the different levels in the hierarchy (micromechanical, layer, panel, subcomponent and component levels); and, (c) application of fuzzy set techniques to identify the range and variation of possible responses. The computational models developed are used in conjunction with experiments to understand the physical phenomena associated with the nonlinear response and failure of stiffened composite panels. A toolkit is developed for use in conjunction with deterministic analysis programs to help the designer in assessing the effect of uncertainties in the different computational model parameters on the variability of the response quantities.

Noor, Ahmed K.↗

NASA NTRS2003

Post-AGB Stars in Nearby Galaxies as Calibrators for HST

This report summarizes activities carried out with support from the NASA Ultraviolet, Visible, and Gravitational Astrophysics Research and Analysis Program under Grant NAG 5-6821. The Principal Investigator is Howard E. Bond (Space Telescope Science Institute). STScI Postdoctoral Associates Laura K. Fullton (1998), David Alves (1998-2001), and Michael Siegel (2001) were partially supported by this grant. The aim of the program is to calibrate the absolute magnitudes of post-asymptotic- giant-branch (post-AGB or PAGB) stars, which we believe will be an excellent new "standard candle" for measuring extragalactic distances. The argument is that, in old populations, the stars that are evolving through the PAGB region of the HR diagram arise from only a single main-sequence turnoff mass. In addition, theoretical PAGB evolutionary tracks show that they evolve through this region at constant luminosity; hence the PAGB stars should have an extremely narrow luminosity function. Moreover, as the PAGB stars evolve through spectral types F and A (en route from the AGB to hot stellar remnants and white dwarfs), they have the highest luminosities attained by old stars (both bolometrically and in the visual band). Finally, PAGB stars of these spectral types are very easily identified. because of their large Balmer jumps, which are due to their very low surface gravities. Our approach is first to identify PAGB stars in Milky Way globular clusters and in other Local Group galaxies, which are at known distances, and thus to measure accurate absolute magnitudes for the PAGB stars. With this Milky Way and Local Group luminosity calibration, we will then be in a position to find PAGB stars in more distant galaxies from the ground, and ultimately from the Hubble Space Telescope. and thus derive distances. These PAGB stars are, as noted above, the visually brightest members of Population II, and hence will allow distance measurements to galaxies that do not contain Cepheids, such as elliptical galaxies, as well as distances to spirals using PAGB stars in their halos. Moreover, the method is entirely independent of Cepheids. and thus provides a direct test of the Cepheid distance scale. The program will also provide information on the evolutionary lifetimes of PAGB stars.

Bond, Howard E.↗

NASA NTRS1997

Efficient Calculation of a Jitter/Stability Metric

A tool for computing a jitter/stability metric used in NASA requirements statements is developed. An efficient algorithm is given for computing this metric. Two ways of implementing it on a computer are discussed. One is optimized for computational speed while the other sacrifices some speed to conserve memory. Timing studies are given to show that the improvement of computation times using the present algorithm over previously existing techniques can run to several orders of magnitude, and that previous techniques were so costly that the present algorithm represents enabling technology. Further comparisons show that the memory conservative implementation runs at about half the speed of the fast implementation, but can cut the major data storage requirement of the fast implementation by 95-99%, making the algorithm implementable on much smaller computers, such as PC's, than it would be otherwise. Software for both implementations is included in version 2 of the NASA time and frequency domain analysis program PLATSIM.

Giesy, Daniel P.↗

NASA NTRS2004

Multi-Mission Strategic Technology Prioritization Study

This viewgraph presentation provides an overview of a pilot study intended to demonstrate in an auditable fashion how advanced space technology development can best impact future NASA missions. The study was a joint project by staff members of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The other goals of the study were to show an approach to deal effectively with inter-program analysis trades, and to explore the limits of these approaches and tools in terms of what can be realistically achieved.

Weisbin, C. R.↗