The Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) is part of a NASA-led team that recently received an HPC Innovation Excellence Awards from Hyperion Research. The project is focused on Closed-Loop Mars Entry Simulations with Distributed Exascale Computing.

Human-scale Mars missions will require large landers using retropropulsion, as traditional parachutes are infeasible for the massive payloads needed. With no prior experience and limited testing possible on Earth, high-fidelity HPC simulations will be critical for developing and validating new technologies. Researchers from NASA and ASDL executed unprecedented, autonomous flight trajectory simulations using the Summit and Frontier platforms at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, demonstrating a viable approach for simulating future crewed Mars missions. The software developed has broad applications across aerospace, defense, and academia. This work has received recognition in multiple forums and media coverage.

Since 2011, Hyperion’s semi-annual innovation excellence awards have been recognized globally as the touchstone for outstanding achievements that were supported by the use of high-performance computing. Winners have ranged from government and academic research teams to some of the world’s largest corporations. The program’s goals are to showcase HPC-supported, real-world achievements with significant potential for benefiting humanity — achievements that demonstrate the value of HPC for research and development in government, academic or private-sector organizations.

For more info, click here for an article from insideHPC or here for an article from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.