Modeling of Advanced Computer Systems

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific opportunity focuses on modeling advanced computer systems. As powerful as today's parallel supercomputers are, they will be inadequate for future applications. Current projections of future computational requirements for important NASA missions range from hundreds to thousands of times the power of today's most powerful systems. Research needs to focus on understanding the characteristics of large NASA applications and on modeling various proposed future parallel system designs to see which design is most likely to meet NASA's future requirements. Candidates must have some experience in modeling computer systems and in coding large-scale scientific applications. Programming experience on highly parallel, RISC-based computers is desirable, as is some experience with scientific visualization.