Looking for Amelia Earhart and her aircraft in southern Kansas may seem as off-course as the ill-fated aviatrix, but researchers at Wichita State’s NIAR Crash Dynamics Laboratory were able to help solve the mystery 75 years after her disappearance.

In addition to conducting secure, proprietary testing in ergonomics and human factors for the nation’s aircraft and aircraft component manufacturers, engineers at NIAR used their state-of-the-art virtual reality techniques to recreate and analyze Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra L10E aircraft ditching event in the Pacific Ocean.

The purpose of the project is to research and determine the technical merit or feasibility of CFD Co-processing for Unsteady Visualization. Co-processing remains a seldom-used method to post-process simulations both because of gains in computing speed and storage capacity, and the lack of reliable, robust automated flow feature extraction methods.

At first glance, this may seem like a familiar school child’s arithmetic problem, but it’s actually a highly sophisticated physics problem. Common sense and experience, of course, tell us that the new car is the better bet. A true scientific explanation, however, lies at the molecular level, beyond the perceptions of the naked eye—but not beyond the reach of researchers at Mississippi State University’s Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS).

Diane Lieberman, publisher of HPCwire, revealed the list of winners at the HPCwire booth at SC07. CEI was recognized with the following honor: Readers’ Choice Award for Most Innovative HPC Visualization Product or Technology for CEI’s extreme visualization product, EnSight.

The interface will allow ADINA-CFD users to import results directly into EnSight for high-end visualizations.