April 2006

BFRL Monthly Highlights

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PAST Highlights

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Testing Standard for Building Automation and Control Devices Adopted by ISO and CEN

The Committee for European Normalization (CEN) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) have just adopted a testing standard for building automation and control devices developed by staff from BFRL in cooperation with industry. For many years, researchers in BFRL have been working with industry to develop standards to enable the integration of building automation and control devices used for heating, ventilating and airconditioning, lighting, fire detection, and physical access control. The result was development and adoption of the BACnet communication protocol as a standard in the United States and later by CEN, ISO, and more than 30 countries. This new CEN and ISO standard (EN ISO 16484-6) is a companion standard to BACnet that began as a cooperative research and development agreement between NIST and more than 20 industry partners. It defines tests that are used to ensure that commercial products conform to the BACnet standard. An American version of this standard was approved by ANSI in 2003 and already has become the basis for product testing and listing programs in the United States and in Europe. Adoption by CEN and ISO is expected to increase awareness of and consumer confidence in independently tested BACnet products, speeding the adoption of this technology in buildings around the world.

CONTACT:
Steven Bushby
301-975-5873
sbushby@nist.gov

 

ITL/BFRL Team Awarded 1 Million Hours on NASA Supercomputer

A team of researchers from ITL and BFRL has been awarded 1,000,000 CPU hours on the Columbia supercomputer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center. The allocation is one of four awards of supercomputer time given out by NASA in a peer-reviewed competition for grand challenge computational science projects led by external researchers. The successful NIST proposal was submitted by William George (team leader) and Judith Terrill of ITL, along with Nicos Martys and Edward Garboczi of BFRL. Entitled “Modeling the Rheological Properties of Suspensions: Application to Cement Based Materials,” the proposal stems from a long-term ITL/BFRL collaboration on high-performance computer modeling of cement and concrete systems. This award of such a highly sought-after computing resource highlights the national importance and technical challenges associated with concrete rheology, which has a tremendous impact on the construction of concrete structures. Concrete construction is a $110 billion per year sector of the U.S. economy. The team will use NASA’s supercomputer to study the flow, dispersion, and merging of dense suspensions composed of rigid bodies having a wide range of size and shape under a variety of flow conditions. Access to the NASA machine will allow modeling at a level and range impossible with existing computing facilities available at NIST. Current modeling of suspensions at NIST facilities has been limited to a few thousand particles and a factor of five to ten in particle size range. Utilization of NASA’s Columbia system will provide the capability to simulate suspensions an order of magnitude larger in the number of inclusions and size range. The new realism of these models will significantly improve the scientific basis for prediction and measurement of the flow properties of concrete. 13 NIST Monthly Highlights April 2006 Columbia is a 10,240-CPU system based on SGI’s NUMAflex architecture. The system is comprised of 20 SGI Altix 3700 superclusters, each with 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors (rated at 1.5 GHz). Each supercluster features 1 terabyte of memory with global shared memory access, for a total of 20 terabytes of memory system-wide. Columbia was put into production in June 2004. The other winners in the NASA competition are from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, and Georgetown University. In total, 4.5 million hours were made available for the next 12 months for this competition, representing 5 percent of the available hours on Columbia. A press release on the award is available at www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/mar/ HQ_06086_super_computer_time.html.

CONTACT:
William George (ITL)
wgeorge@nist.gov

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