NASA's Supercomputers, Hyperwall Display, and SLS Booster Strakes Explained

NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Facility

• 🚀 The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility has been home to NASA's most powerful supercomputers since the 1970s, focusing on computational fluid dynamics for aircraft and rocket development.
• 💡 Combining high-fidelity simulations with wind tunnel facilities allows for extensive testing and problem identification before committing to full-scale prototypes, saving significant costs.

Evolution of Supercomputing at NASA

• 🧠 NASA Ames's supercomputing history began with the Iliac 4 in the 1970s, the first supercomputer connected to ARPANET, though it was over budget and only partially built.
• 📈 Cray supercomputers and later Thinking Machines CM2/CM5 systems increased performance through the 80s and 90s, leading to Silicon Graphics systems by 2000.
• ⚡ The current fastest machine, Pleiades, began in 2008 with 400 teraflops and now operates at 7.5 petaflops, nearly a billion times faster than the Iliac 4.

NAS Compute Floor and Infrastructure

• 📊 The NAS facility runs primary supercomputers for all NASA missions, with systems like Pleiades housing 250,000 CPU cores and 900 terabytes of memory.
• 🧊 A modular supercomputing infrastructure uses shipping container-like modules, leveraging passive heat transfer and direct water cooling on chips to save significant costs.
• ⚡ The facility operates 24/7/365, with a power draw of around 4 megawatts, and utilizes rotational UPS with flywheels and generators for backup power.

The NAS Hyperwall Visualization System

• 🖼️ The Hyperwall is a massive display system composed of 128 compute nodes, each with a 27-inch 4K monitor, creating a 16x8 billion pixel display for exploring multi-dimensional data.
• 🌊 It enables real-time data streaming, processing, and rendering, facilitating collaborative analysis of massive datasets, such as the ECHO model for ocean circulation and climate.
• 🔬 Scientists use the Hyperwall to study ocean dynamics from large current systems to sub-kilometer scale eddies, visualizing data like sea surface speed and tidal movements.

Pressure Sensitive Paint and CFD Simulations

• 🎨 Unsteady pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) is an optical diagnostic used on wind tunnel models; it changes brightness based on oxygen partial pressure, allowing pressure readings across the entire model surface.
• 🚀 High-speed cameras process PSP data, which requires significant supercomputing power, and was used to address issues with the SLS rocket, specifically concerning strakes that suppress vibrations.
• 💨 Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations, like those using NASA's LAVA solver, with billions of mesh nodes, provide detailed insights into flow dynamics, complementing experimental data from PSP.
• 🛰️ CFD simulations can now be generated overnight, enabling rapid iteration and comparison with experimental results, leading to improved designs like the SLS booster strakes, which mitigate problematic vortex shedding.

Exploring Vast Datasets

• ✨ The Hyperwall also allows for viewing extremely high-resolution images, such as those from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, enabling detailed examination of distant galaxies.
• 🤝 The facility showcases the integration of experimental capabilities (wind tunnels, PSP) with computational power (supercomputers, CFD) to solve complex engineering problems.