|
NASA LANGLEY TEAM RECEIVES SOFTWARE OF THE YEAR
AWARD
A team from NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., has
won the agency’s 2004 Software of the Year Award.
The team, comprised of seven Langley employees, one employee at
the Air Force Research Lab and one contractor at NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center, developed the Tetrahedral Unstructured
Software System (TetrUSS), a suite of computational programs used
for fluid dynamics and aerodynamics analysis.
The TetrUSS team, left to right: Khaled S. Abdol-Hamid, Jamshid A.
Samareh, Paresh C. Parikh,
Craig A. Hunter, Shahyar dZ. Pirzadeh, Neal T. Frink, Mohagna J.
Pandya.
Originally developed for NASA internal applications, TetrUSS has
evolved into an efficient and versatile computer fluid dynamics
(CFD) tool used by engineers and scientists throughout the nation.
The software is widely used in other government organizations, the
aerospace industry, academia and non-aerospace industries such as
automotive, biomedical and civil engineering.
TetrUSS won the Software of the Year Award in 1996 but was
honored again this year for TetrUSS 2004, a new version which
incorporates developments the team has made over the last eight
years.
Jesse Midgett, Langley’s Awards Liaison Officer, said
TetrUSS is the single most awarded technology in the history of
NASA’s Space Act Invention Awards Program since it was
initiated in 1958.
“The accomplishment of the TetrUSS team is truly a
landmark achievement for a NASA technology,” Midgett said.
“The TetrUSS team’s performance exemplifies how
employees at Langley never give up in their quest for better and
better products.”-more--2-TetrUSS has been used to support
many NASA projects, notably X-43, Mars Scout and the American
Airlines Flight 587 investigation. It is also in use at more than
75 academic institutions and more than 500 government and industry
sites for all classes of aerospace and industrial fluid flow
applications worth many billions of dollars.
“Lockheed-Martin has relied heavily on the TetrUSS system
for aerodynamic analysis of complex configurations,” said
Rick Hooker, a TetrUSS user at Lockheed-Martin Corp. “This
system has proven very reliable and robust and provides critical
capabilities not available in other packages.”
TetrUSS is on a bit of a roll. In June, it received an Apple
Design Award, placing ahead of applications developed by
Improvision and IBM for Best Mac OSX Scientific Computing
Solution.
“I was really surprised we beat out those
companies,” said Craig Hunter, one of the TetrUSS developers
at Langley. “They put out some really good
software.”
NASA’s Software of the Year Award is designed to reward
outstanding software developed for the agency. Software eligible
for the award must have NASA intellectual property interest, be of
commercial grade, and be available to appropriate commercial users
or dedicated to a NASA mission.
For more information about the Software of the Year award on the
Internet, visit:
http://icb.nasa.gov/nasaswy.html
-end-
|
