For Release:
May 13, 1997

Lynn Chandler
Lynn.Chandler.1@gsfc.nasa.gov
(Phone: 301-286-9016)

RELEASE NO: 97-54

SUPERCOMPUTER NAMED FOR PIONEER RESEARCHER AT GODDARD

NASA's fastest supercomputer is being named for Dr. Joanne Simpson, chief scientist for meteorology in the Earth Science's Directorate at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Simpson was chosen for the honor for her pioneering work using computers in meteorological research. A dedication ceremony will be held at Goddard May 14.

"It is a great honor to have such a remarkable supercomputer named after me," said Simpson. The NASA meteorologist was a pioneer in cloud modeling, producing the first one-dimensional model and the first cumulus model on a computer. She also led research into multi-cloud modeling. Her credits include more than 170 publications in the areas of tropical meteorology, tropical cloud systems and modeling, tropical storms and tropical rain measurement from space.

In addition to being the chief scientist for meteorology at Goddard, Simpson also serves as project scientist for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). The spacecraft is the first mission dedicated to measuring tropical and subtropical rainfall through microwave and visible infrared sensors, and includes the first spaceborne rain radar. The joint U.S.-Japanese mission is scheduled to be launched this fall from Japan.

The CRAY T3E to be named for Simpson is a scalable parallel computer, on which a program's speed increases proportionally with the number of processors. The supercomputer currently has 256 processors, 33 billion bytes of memory and a peak speed of 153 billion floating-point operations per second (gigaFLOPS). This summer it will be upgraded to 512 processors, 66 billion bytes of memory and at least 306 gigaFLOPS peak, placing the Goddard CRAY T3E among the top 15 supercomputers in the world. It would take every person in the United States punching calculators over 30 years to equal what the CRAY T3E can do in one second.

The main users of the CRAY T3E are the NASA High Performance Computing and Communications Program's Earth and Space Sciences Project investigator teams. Those scientists are pursuing such challenges as changes in global climate and the Earth's interior, manufacturing in microgravity environments, and the evolution and dynamics of stars. The user community also includes other Earth and space scientists and aeroscience researchers from the NASA community.

Simpson received her Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Chicago in 1949. The positions she has held include: Assistant Professor of Physics, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1949-1951; Meteorologist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 1951-1960; Professor of Meteorology, University of California at Los Angeles, 1960-1964; Director, Experimental Meteorology Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 1964-1974; Corcoran Professor of Environmental Science, University of Virginia, 1974-1981; and Head of the Severe Storms Branch, Goddard, 1979-1988. She has served as project scientist for TRMM since 1986. She became Chief Scientist for Meteorology in 1988 and a Goddard Senior Fellow in 1989. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, and was made a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 1968 and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 1994.

She has held numerous positions within the American Meteorological Society, including two terms as Councilor in the 1970's, Commissioner of Scientific and Technological Activities, 1981-1987, President in 1989, and Publications Commissioner, 1992 to present.

Among the awards that Simpson has received are the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954, the American Meteorological Society Meisinger Award in 1962, the Rossby Research Medal in 1983, and the C.F. Brooks Award in 1992. She also received the Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 1972, the Professional Achievement Award of the University of Chicago Alumni in 1975 and 1992, and the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award in 1982. She received the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990. Simpson also was awarded the first William Nordberg Memorial Award for Earth Science in 1994.

Simpson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988. She has been listed in Who's Who of American Women since 1972 and in Who's Who in America since 1980.

Simpson, a resident of Washington, D.C., was born in Boston in 1923 and spent her childhood in Cambridge, Mass. and Cape Cod. She met her husband, Dr. Robert H. Simpson, when she was a consultant for his National Hurricane Research Project. They have been married 32 years and have had many adventures with their combined families of five children and five grandchildren.

Both Joanne and Bob grew up near the ocean and have been avid sailors, owning a series of family sailboats until recently, when they have retired to the less demanding hobby of snorkeling and learning about the cultures in many parts of the world. Their shared research on hurricanes continues, with a project which is helping to understand how these monster storms are formed and why there are so many cloud clusters but so few hurricanes.

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