Newswise — A special issue of the IOS Press journal Scientific Programming introduces some new capabilities for advanced modeling, simulation and analysis in science and engineering. The issue 'High Performance Computing for Mission-Enabling Space Applications' is guest edited by Charles D. Norton of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology.
The capabilities, developed at JPL, are related to electric propulsion plume simulations, large-scale rover navigation simulations, large-scale mosaic generation from Spitzer surveys, and ocean/sea-ice interaction sensitivity studies. Numerous other applications have also been pursued to address the needs in computational science and engineering.
Advanced modeling, simulation and analysis are essential to JPL mission success. Spanning all phases from mission conceptual design, spacecraft systems engineering, instrument development, navigation, science data product generation, and public outreach, computing has become ubiquitous and the demands for increased capability are growing rapidly.
JPL and Caltech helped pioneer and establish the area of supercomputing in the mid-80s with development of the Cosmic Cube (C. Seitz). As the capability goals of JPL mission and technology projects grow in complexity, the utilization of high capability computing will allow more thorough and in-depth engineering design trade-space analyses, faster and more accurate modeling for science understanding, virtual exploration of new mission and instrument concepts, and a more complete understanding of the interplay between the spacecraft and the space environment, to name a few.
The Editor also contributed to the previous issue of Scientific Programming on the 50th anniversary of the Fortran programming language, edited by Boleslaw Szymanski, professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
© 2007 IOS Press. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use prohibited.
"High Performance Computing for Mission-Enabling Space Applications" is a special issue of the IOS Press journal Scientific Programming (Volume 15, Number 2 (2007)).
About Charles D. NortonCharles D. Norton is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He specializes in advanced scientific software for Earth and space science modeling with an emphasis on high performance computing. His current research address topics in observing systems simulation experiments for instrument design, modeling and validation of precision structures, and smart instrument on-board processing techniques. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Scientific Programming, the IEEE technical committee on scalable computing, and a recipient of a NASA exceptional service medal.
Contents
Guest-Editorial/ C.D. Norton
Parallel MOPEX: Computing mosaics of large-area Spitzer surveys on a cluster computer/ J.C. Jacob, P. Eisenhardt and D. Makovoz
Electric propulsion plume simulations using parallel computer/ J. Wang, Y. Cao, R. Kafafy and V. Decyk
Performance characterization of a rover navigation algorithm using largescale simulation/ R. Madison, A. Jain, C. Lim and M. Maimone
Investigating solution convergence in a global ocean model using a 2048-processor cluster of distributed shared memory machines/ C. Hill, D. Menemenlis, B. Ciotti and C. Henze
Book Review
About Scientific ProgrammingScientific Programming (ISSN: 1058-9244, Editors-in-Chief: Ronald H. Perrott and Boleslaw Szymanski) provides a forum for research results in, and practical experience with, software engineering environments, tools, languages, and models of computation aimed specifically at supporting scientific and engineering computing. Scientific Programming brings together in one place developments that are found in a wide variety of journals, conference proceedings and informal society journals. Scientific Programming publishes papers on language, compiler and programming environment issues for scientific computing. Of particular interest are contributions to programming and software engineering for grid computing, high performance computing, processing very large data sets, supercomputing, visualization, parallel and distributed computing. All languages used in scientific programming, such as Fortran/F90, C/C++, Java and their descendants, as well as scientific programming libraries, such as PVM, MPI, BSP, LogP, Matlab are within the scope of the journal. Scientific Programming celebrates its 15th volume this year.
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