when aeronautical engineers want to know
how air will flow over one of their
designs they can build a model and test
it in a wind tunnel but thanks to
today's supercomputers like this Cray
XMP there's a less costly less
time-consuming way to evaluate their
ideas these ultra-fast machines with
incredibly large memories make it
possible to do timely accurate
simulations before committing to
expensive hardware and it's not just air
flow that can be studied here the flow
of water around a submarine is being
investigated
even the flow of fuel through the
shuttles main engines can be examined
recently scientists producing these
simulations at NASA's Ames Research
Center in Mountain View California began
using a new supercomputer the Cray two
though much smaller than the previous
generation great it's faster than any
computer in the world performing 250
million calculations per second it also
has 10 times more memory than any
existing machine in fact the cray 2 is
so powerful that its circuitry is
continually immersed in a cooling
solution to keep it from overheating
putting this new supercomputers
capabilities into proper perspective is
the manager of the numerical aerodynamic
simulation program at Ames Ron Baker
what you see in this this small tank of
liquid in the crate who is equivalent to
a warehouse a small home computer the
crate - makes more comprehensive
simulations possible for example the
people at Ames have been able to
simulate airflow around the shuttle
orbiter itself but the orbiter attached
to the solid rocket boosters large
external fuel
as opposed to great a problem for any
computer today ames research scientist
and he shows you but with the cray-2
becoming accessible to us that will give
us enough storage or memory where we can
actually solve the flow around this
whole configuration and in some cases it
may be very important to see what that
flow is in order to maybe be able to
take safer routes when the thing is
going off the pad
the cray-2 will also play a key role in
technology development for the NASA DoD
national aerospace plane program leading
to an entire new family of aerospace
vehicles in the next century
NASA's preto supercomputer a valuable
new tool in air and spacecraft design