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NASA will dedicate a new supercomputer this week to honor the memory of
astronaut Kalpana "KC" Chawla, one of the seven crew members aboard the Space
Shuttle Columbia, lost Feb. 1, 2003. The dedication ceremony will be held
May 12 at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Before joining the astronaut program, Chawla worked as an aerospace engineer
at Ames from 1988 to 1995. Chawla, the first Indian-born woman to fly in
space, served as a flight engineer and mission specialist aboard Columbia.
"It is indeed an honor to name NASA's new SGI(r) Altix(tm) 3000 supercomputer
after Kalpana Chawla," said Ames Center Director G. Scott Hubbard. "She was not
only a member of the NASA family, but also a special member of our own Ames
family. We all miss her and her many contributions to the agency."
At Ames, Chawla had the challenging task of computing the airflow
surrounding a jet-supported delta-wing aircraft during landing. During an
interview in 1995, Chawla predicted that her exposure to a wide variety of
computer systems at Ames would be especially useful to her as an
astronaut. Of the dozens of experiments successfully conducted by the Columbia
crew, Chawla's favorite was the Israeli Mediterranean Dust Experiment, which
involved pointing a camera at Earth to study the effects of dust on weather
and the environment.
"Fittingly, the SGI(r) Altix(tm) 3000 supercomputer that will be named 'Kalpana' is being used to develop
substantially more capable simulation models to better assess the evolution
and behavior of the Earth's climate system," said Ghassem Asrar, NASA's
associate administrator for Earth Science.
The new supercomputer is being used for a group effort by NASA Headquarters,
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., NASA Ames and NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., to deliver high-resolution ocean
analysis in the framework of the ECCO (Estimating the Circulation and Climate
of the Ocean) Consortium, which involves JPL, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., and the Scripps Institute of
Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif.
The new supercomputer 'Kalpana' is not the first at NASA Ames to be named in
honor of a person, and in fact, follows a long tradition at the research center
of naming its new supercomputers after pioneers in the supercomputer industry
or others in recognition of their achievements. A total of six
supercomputers at Ames are named as follows:
Chapman, an SGI Origin 3000, 1,024-processor single-image, shared
memory system named after Dr. Dean Chapman, a former Director of
Astronautics at Ames who developed heat protection systems for the Space
Shuttle; Lomax, a 512-processor SGI Origin 2000 supercomputer named after
Dr. Harvard Lomax, a pioneer in Computational Fluid Dynamics who also
worked at Ames; Steger, a 128-processor Origin 2800 supercomputer named after
Joseph Steger, whose work in computational technology revolutionized
the use of computers to solve complex aerospace problems; Lou, the main
production storage system at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division named
after Ames research scientist Louis Lopez; Hopper, a 64-processor Origin
2000 supercomputer named after Grace Hopper, a pioneer in computer science
and Turing, a 24-processor SGI Origin 2000 supercomputer named for Alan
Turing, a mathematician and early computer pioneer.
"With the addition of the SGI Altix system, NASA's high-end computing
testbed activities in support of the agency's science and engineering
missions are greatly enhanced," said Dr.Walt Brooks, chief of the NASA
Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames. "Thanks to its
outstanding performance capabilities, this supercomputer is helping NASA
achieve breakthrough results to meet major challenges in climate and ocean
modeling and aerospace vehicle design," Brooks added.
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