ESTO CT Investigators Receive Time on NASA's Columbia Supercomputer

NASA's Science Mission Directorate recently awarded members of ESTO Computational Technologies (CT) Project investigation teams a total of 3.65 million processor-hours on NASA's Columbia supercomputer. Columbia is a 10,240-processor SGI Altix system located at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. Capable of performing over 50 trillion calculations per second, Columbia is currently the second fastest supercomputer in the world. CT-affiliated awardees received time allocations ranging from 100,000 to 1.5 million processor hours over the next year.

From one of the first gamma ray burst simulations using the IBEAM software framework, radiation energy density is visualized as a relativistic shock strikes a gas cloud that is denser than its surroundings. The post-shock material is traveling at 1/10 of the speed of light (Image credit: Paul Ricker, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

The Columbia awards are as follows:

Venkatramani Balaji, Princeton University, 1) Coupled Ocean and Atmosphere Data Assimilation System for Climate of the 20th Century, 2) Modeling of Entire Hurricane Season Using High-Resolution Non-Hydrostatic models

Alan Calder, University of Chicago, The Application of an Interoperability Based Environment for Adaptive Meshes to Radiation-Hydrodynamic Models of Gamma-Ray Bursts (IBEAM)

Andrea Donnellan, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Simulating Earthquake Processes on High-End Computers

Tamas Gombosi, University of Michigan, Halloween Storm Simulations with the Space Weather Modeling Framework

Christa Peters-Lidard, Goddard Space Flight Center, High-Performance Simulation and Data Assimilation with High-Resolution Land and Atmosphere Models and Advanced Computational Technologies

Michele Rienecker, Goddard Space Flight Center, 1) Advanced Data Assimilation into a High-Resolution Global Ocean Model Using an Ensemble Kalman Filter, 2) High-Resolution Coupled Climate Simulations

Max Suarez, Goddard Space Flight Center, Development of GEOS-5 Atmospheric Assimilation System