Overview of ESS Applications Software Research

Project Goal and Objectives: The goal of the ESS applications software activity is to enable the development of NASA Grand Challenge applications on those computing platforms that are evolving towards sustained teraFLOPS performance. The objectives are to:

• Identify the NASA Grand Challenge Investigations and Guest Computational Investigations;
• Identify computational techniques, termed Computational Challenges, which are essential to the success of the Grand Challenge problems;
• Formulate embodiments of these techniques that are adapted to and perform well on highly parallel systems; and
• Capture the successes in a reusable form.

Strategy and Approach: The strategy is to select NASA Grand Challenges from a vast array of candidate NASA science problems, to select teams of aggressive scientific Investigators to attempt to implement the Grand Challenge problems on scalable testbeds, and to provide institutionalized computational technique development support to solve the Computational Challenges in order to accelerate the progress of the Investigators and to capture the results. The approach involves use of the peer-reviewed NASA Research Announcement (NRA) as the mechanism to select the Grand Challenge Investigations and their Investigator teams. Inhouse teams of computational scientists have been developed at GSFC and JPL to solve the Computational Challenges.

Organization: The Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology, jointly with the Office of Space Science and Applications, selected the ESS Investigators through the peer reviewed NASA Research Announcement process. The ESS Science Team, composed of the Principal Investigators chosen through the ESS NRA, and chaired by the ESS Project Scientist, organizes and carries out periodic workshops for the investigator teams and coordinates the computational experiments of the Investigations. The ESS Evaluation Coordinator focuses activities of the Science Team leading to development of ESS computational and throughput benchmarks. A staff of computational scientists supports the Investigations by developing scalable computational techniques which address their Computational Challenges.

Management Plan: At GSFC, a Deputy Project Manager for Applications directs the inhouse team of computational scientists. At JPL, a Deputy Task Leader performs the same function. ESS and its Investigators contribute annual software submissions to the High Performance Computing Software Exchange.

Points of Contact:

Steve Zalesak
Goddard Space Flight Center
zalesak@gondor.gsfc.nasa.gov
301-286-8935

Robert Ferraro
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
ferraro@zion.jpl.nasa.gov
818-354-1340