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MEDIA ADVISORY
UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and
Space to Celebrate Role in New NASA space mission and arrival of
state-of-the-art supercomputing cluster
Contact: David Sims
603-862-5369
Science Writer
Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space
Feb. 4, 2005
WHAT: Celebration of the University of New Hampshire’s selection
for a key role in NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer
mission and the installation of a supercomputing cluster to be used
in space, atmospheric, and Earth system research. Brief presentations
on these major developments will be given, and key scientists will
be present to answer questions.
WHEN: 2:30 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2005
WHERE: Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS),
Morse Hall atrium, Durham campus.
PARKING: Available behind Morse Hall.
BACKGROUND: Scientists Eberhard Möebius and Marty Lee of the
University of New Hampshire's EOS Space Science Center and Department
of Physics have been selected by NASA to help build instruments
for a mission characterized as the "first step beyond the solar
system and into the galactic frontier." The UNH team was awarded
$5 million. As part of NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or
IBEX mission, Möebius, Lee, and a team of engineers, scientists,
and students at UNH will construct critical components of the special
cameras on board the IBEX spacecraft.
The supercomputer cluster recently acquired and installed at EOS
puts UNH in a select league of universities around the country with
this kind of high-end computing power. The custom-configured Linux
Beowulf Clusters, provided by Microway, Inc. of Plymouth, Mass.,
will be used by EOS researchers to simulate processes in space plasmas,
to model the spread of pollutants through New England's air and
their influence on climate, and to model Earth's ecosystems. The
cluster will be able to perform more than one trillion operations
per second or about 1,000 times as fast as an ordinary PC. Even
with such enormous computer power many of the space, atmosphere,
and Earth models used by researchers still require several days
to run to completion.
To read the press releases on IBEX and the computer cluster, go
to:
http://www.unh.edu/news/news_releases/2005/february/ds_050203nasa.html
http://www.unh.edu/news/news_releases/2004/december/ds_20041208supercomputer.html
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