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CALSPAN'S SPACECRAFT RE-ENTRY PROJECT AMONG TASKS FOR UB SUPERCOMPUTER
Published on January 16, 1999
Author: FRED O. WILLIAMS - News Business Reporter
© The Buffalo News Inc.
When a spacecraft re-enters earth's atmosphere, its edge grows as hot as the surface of the sun. Molecules in the air around it lose their chemical bonds and recombine in a weird molecular soup.
At Calspan in Cheektowaga, Ken Chadwick studies the high-speed phenomenon to help design a smoother, cooler space shuttle -- a project he hopes will get a substantial boost from the University at Buffalo's new supercomputer research center, which was announced Friday. "When you try to do modeling of what happens as those vehicles go through the air, it's very complex," said Chadwick, head of Calspan's hypersonic aerospace research group. "There are not many (supercomputer) sites where you can look at the entire vehicle." Chadwick's aerodynamic research is one of several projects in Western New York that stand to get a lift from UB's $7 million Center for Computational Research. The center is underwritten largely by IBM Corp. and Silicon Graphics Inc., whose machines will be its twin computing engines. Already partly operational, the research center is being installed in a newly remodeled home at UB's North Campus in Amherst, with completion set for sometime in May, officials said. Roughly as powerful as 700 high-end Pentium personal computers, the center's equipment will allow researchers to take on computation-intensive tasks, from aerodynamic simulation to designing pharmaceutical molecules and modeling global climate change. The center puts UB among the top 10 academic computer sites in the country, officials said, a profile that should help it attract top researchers as well as students. "At most campuses, there are a handful of four or five (supercomputer) projects," said Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The places getting these machines are going to be able to have dozens of projects." Smarr's supercomputer center is one of two in the United States that are available to university researchers, but they're stretched thin. For a research project to get access, "you have to compete with everybody in the country," he said. UB's move is emblematic of how supercomputers are becoming less exotic in the academic world and more of a standard research tool, he added. As supercomputer resources become more widely available -- partly because of falling prices -- they will be used in more and more fields. Smarr, who also serves on a White House advisory committee on technology, said several other research universities are developing "mid-level" supercomputers on a par with UB's research center, including Penn State, Boston University and the University of Minnesota. Companies in Western New York, not just university researchers, will be able to access the UB supercomputer, said Russ Miller, director of the UB research center and professor of computer science and engineering. Praxair, Calspan and Occidental Chemical are among the companies that have expressed interest in joint supercomputer research. For example, Chadwick at Calspan expects to enter a joint research project with UB that will aid his aerodynamics research. His examination of the physics of re-entry could help build a space shuttle that doesn't need to carry a heavy heat shield of tiles into orbit each time it goes up. "Those tiles are going to be gone in the next generation -- we need to find some more elegant ways around the problem," Chadwick said. To study what happens when a spacecraft plows into earth's atmosphere, Chadwick builds a mathematical model of the vehicle's surface. With intense computational power, the model can predict the temperature on each square-inch section of the craft from one instant to the next, as it rubs against the increasingly dense atmosphere. With that information, designers can come up with shapes that generate less heat and drag than today's re-entry vehicles. Chadwick currently runs his model on Calspan's two-processor Silicon Graphics computer, with a fraction of the UB research center's 64-processor machine. The greater power will allow him to model an entire spacecraft at once instead of examining pieces of it separately, he said. Miller, director of the UB computational research center, studies molecular structures, a task that provides another example of the uses for a supercomputer. As a senior research scientist at Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, Miller helped develop a computer program to determine a molecule's shape -- the key to its effect on the human body. His program was used to determine the sub-microscopic shape of the antibiotic vancomycin, allowing researchers to design variants that kill drug-resistant viruses without harming the patient. "Once you really know what's in there, you know how it will react with the human body," he said. With information about the number of atoms in the molecule, the computer winnows through millions of possible combinations to determine the chemical's exact shape. Even with Miller's time-saving program, it took four weeks for a powerful computer at the University of Pennsylvania to map the chemical structure. An Internet list of the top 500 supercomputers in use worldwide helped Miller determine that the UB center will be among the most powerful academic research sites in the United States. The list, maintained by the University of Manneheim in Germany, is on the World Wide Web at www.top500.org UB's computational research center also has a Web site, at www.ccr.buffalo.eduCHARLES LEWIS/Buffalo News
Russ Miller, UB computer center director, checks the university's new
Origin 2000 supercomputers.
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