INDUSTRY

Northrop Grumman Corporation, in partnership with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Intel Corp. and Silicon Graphics, Inc., has delivered a unique high performance computing solution to NASA to improve hurricane forecasts. NASA will use the solution for its African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses (NAMMA) campaign. Northrop Grumman's Information Technology (IT) sector and its partners, will provide high performance computing and networking, innovative visualization capabilities, and distributed data servers. "Since going operational in July, the system has provided high grid resolution and three- to five-day forecasts on the four Atlantic hurricanes thus far: Ernesto, Florence, Gordon, and Helene," said Dr. Robert Brammer, chief technology officer of Northrop Grumman IT. "Our internal research in environmental forecasting, lambda optical networks, distributed storage area networks and high performance cluster computing will help NASA conduct hurricane research and improve hurricane forecasts to the public." Northrop Grumman's high performance computer, provided by Intel, is a Linux cluster consisting of 256 Itanium processors, capable of generating terabytes of research data per day. Visualization technology provided by Silicon Graphics is used to help researchers analyze and interpret the forecast data. This research data is seamlessly transferred back to NASA Goddard's scientific data portal via Northrop Grumman's TRIAD high-speed optical network as it is produced. NASA's ongoing tropical weather forecasting research project, NAMMA, is a field research investigation using multiple research and observation methods to study the formation and evolution of tropical hurricanes in the eastern and central Atlantic; their impact on the U.S. east coast and the composition and structure of the Saharan Air Layer; and how aerosols may affect cloud precipitation and cyclone development.