NASA STTR 2005 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (SBC):		RESEARCH INSTITUTION (RI):
NAME:	Decisive Analytics Corporation	NAME:	Louisiana State University
ADDRESS:	1235 South Clark Street, Suite 400	ADDRESS:	Office of Sponsored Programs, 330 Thomas Boyd Hall
CITY:	Arlington	CITY:	Baton Rouge
STATE/ZIP:	VA  22202-4361	STATE/ZIP:	LA  70803-0001
PHONE:	(703) 414-5024	PHONE:	(225) 578-3386

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name,Email)
David    Fiske
david.fiske@dac.us

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT ( Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
Our proposal and the Phase I work completed under it addressed these NASA-identified needs by providing software infrastructure that provides physical scientists a "plug-and-play" architecture in which they can insert their "physics kernels" and exploit very large existing code bases for the computer science aspects of the problem. In particular, our STTR product provides cutting-edge adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) capabilities, and our Phase I results demonstrate the ability of our software architecture to run existing physics code with the newly incorporated AMR driver. Our innovative solution to the problem delivered significant value to NASA at a relatively small cost by combining existing open source tools. In Phase I, we built an interface, which we call Parca, between the Paramesh computational libraries, developed at NASA GSFC to support AMR computations in the area computational hydrodynamics, and the Cactus computational toolkit, which is an infrastructure package developed by Louisiana State University that provides a "plug-and-play" framework for cross-institution and cross-disciplinary scientific codes. Both of these software packages have large user bases in the areas of computational fluid dynamics and numerical general relativity, and both had existing users at NASA GSFC. Prior to our Phase I work, there was no way these user communities to collaborate directly, leading each user group to redevelop software already available in the other user community.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS ( Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
We have a three-thrust Phase III plan that include both entering new business areas and including the Parca brand software developed under this proposal to our existing business areas. Each of the three thrusts, (1) Parallel Scientific, (2) ComputinSensor resource management and mission planning, and (3) Science and engineering applications of MHD have applications in NASA. In particular, the LISA mission already has concrete plans to use our software starting with integration of the Phase I product almost immediately. In addition, the proposal lists customers in the DOD and DHS with who we already have contract or with whom we have pending proposals who are potential customers for this software.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS ( Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
By combing the Parca software developed under this proposal with existing technologies developed under other funding, DAC will transition software developed under the Phase I and Phase II contracts to customers in the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. The applications include the dynamic and automated planning of routes for UAVs, and the placement of chemical and biological sensors for both military and homeland defense applications.

In addition, DAC will begin entering the scientific computing market by offering "premium service" applications on top of open source community software tools. These services will augment the existing scientific software and make it more accessible to a wider user community.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING

Sensor Webs/Distributed Sensors Simulation Modeling Environment