Don Nolan-Proxmire
Headquarters, Washington, DC	August 23, 1996
(Phone: 202/358-1983)

Allen Kenitzer
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD (Phone: 301/286-2806)

Jarrett Cohen
Hughes STX Corp.
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD (Phone: 301/286-2744)

RELEASE: 96-58

NASA AWARDS $25.8 MILLION TO ADVANCE SUPERCOMPUTING APPLICATIONS 

NASA has awarded a series of cooperative agreements valued at $25.8 million, supporting collaboration 
among NASA, nine investigator teams and Cray Research, Eagan, MN, to achieve supercomputer 
applications ten times faster than available today.

The advances being pursued, which will provide a new understanding of the fundamental problems in the 
Earth and space sciences, include modeling changes in global climate and the Earth's interior, simulating the 
evolution and dynamics of stars, probing microgravity environments, and processing remote sensing 
imagery and signals. For broader benefit, the new computer programs and documentation will be made 
available to the research community on the World Wide Web's National High Performance Computing and 
Communications (HPCC) Software Exchange at:

http://nhse.cs.utk.edu/home.html

The three-year agreements are funded through the Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) Project of NASA's 
HPCC Program. 

Science advances will be enabled by a 384-processor CRAY T3E supercomputer being placed at NASA's 
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, as part of a $13.2 million agreement with Cray Research. 
"With 49 billion bytes of memory and 230 billion floating point operations per second at peak performance, 
this system will be NASA's leading testbed for scalable parallel computing, in which a program's speed 
increases proportionally with the number of processors," said James Fischer, ESS Project Manager. Cray 
Research subsequently will assemble a CRAY T3E as large as 1,024 processors to allow 100 billion 
floating point operations per second sustained on investigator applications. 

"This effort will further the Earth and space sciences by helping to overcome one of high-performance 
computing's greatest bottlenecks -- the lack of usable software for parallel machines," said Lee Holcomb, 
Director, Aviation Systems Technology Division at NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. "Such 
computational studies strongly mesh with NASA's observational and theoretical programs and contribute to 
our wider mission of scientific research and space exploration." 

In August, Cray Research will place an interim CRAY T3D system (the CRAY T3E's predecessor) with 512 
processors and 32 billion bytes of memory at Goddard. By June 1997, NASA and the investigators will 
complete transition to the 384- processor CRAY T3E. Access to larger CRAY T3E systems will occur 
before the program's conclusion in 1999. Time on the computers will be divided among ESS Project and 
NASA HPCC Computational Aerosciences Project investigations and other NASA Earth and space sciences 
researchers. 

Additional ESS Project information and details on the specific investigations may be obtained on the World 
Wide Web at the URL: http://sdcd.gsfc.nasa.gov/ESS/ 

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