Parallel Computing With Satellite Orbit Analysis Program

This software innovation speeds up the computation time of the Satellite Orbit Analysis Program (SOAP) tool by parallelizing the code using the message- passing interface (MPI) library. The speed increases almost linearly with the number of processors, allowing the perstudy duration of the visualization and analysis of space missions to take place in hours, rather than overnight. The software can conduct a parametric study involving millions of design vectors in a few hours of computational time by distributing the design scenarios among multiple processors. This allows SOAP to run in a parallel mode on JPL’s new, high-performance computer cluster, which has 1024 Intel Xeon processors.