Professor Dimitri Mavriplis

UW Professor Member of Award Winning Team at the International Supercomputing Conference

Jan. 3, 2006 - University of Wyoming Mechanical Engineering Professor Dimitri Mavriplis was a member of a research team that tied for the Best Technical Paper Award at SC/05 (Supercomputing 2005), an international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis held recently in Seattle.

Their paper, "High Resolution Aerospace Applications using the NASA Columbia Supercomputer," demonstrated high-performance computer simulations of aerospace vehicle aerodynamics on one of the world's largest supercomputers. Other team members were Michael J. Aftosmis, with the NASA Ames Research Center, and Marsha Berger of New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

The technical papers at the SC/05 conference represent hundreds of thousands of hours of research described by more than 600 authors in 260 paper submissions, reviewed by a committee of 248 of their peers to select the 62 best papers to be presented at SC/05. The other winning paper was written by a group of researchers from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

"This research marked the first time that the NASA supercomputer's high-performance capabilities were applied on this large a scale to solve real aerospace design and analysis problems," Mavriplis says. He explains that the NASA Columbia computer, named in honor of the former Columbia space shuttle, and currently the world's fourth most powerful machine, has a maximum capability of running simultaneous calculations on up to 10,240 central processing units (cpus) or processors.

"The question was, could we run a real problem at such high speeds, using thousands of processors on this computer, as no one had done this before," Mavriplis says. He says the supercomputer is comprised of 20 cabinets or boxes each containing 512 cpus. All 20 boxes are linked together with a high speed network, enabling them to work together on a single large problem. The research team was able to successfully run aerodynamic design codes using eight of the boxes, or 4,016 cpus, achieving a computational rate of 5.2 trillion mathematical operations per second.

"The program is like a computerized wind tunnel experiment, giving you three-dimensional results of the effects of pressure, velocity, density, and many other variables under a range of conditions. It gives you a complete description of the flow fields to aid in the aerodynamic design of vehicles such as aircraft, missiles, and the space shuttle," he says.

Mavriplis plans to run even larger calculations on the NASA computer. "We think we can enable faster and more accurate results using up to 16 boxes, or more than 8,000 processors in the near future," he says.

Professor Mavriplis joined the UW faculty in 2003 after serving since 1987 as a research fellow and staff scientist with the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering at NASA's Langley Research Center. He earned his Ph.D. (1987) in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, and received his M.S. (1982) and B.S. (1980) degrees at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.