Software for Displaying and Comparing Wind-Tunnel Data

DARWIN is a computer program that provides access, via the Internet, to geographically dispersed NASA computer archives of both meta-data and raw test data from wind tunnels and raw simulation data from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) sites. DARWIN facilitates the manipulation and examination of the raw data by presenting the data in two- and three-dimensional plots, and other visual displays. DARWIN provides a "live" window that can be used during a wind-tunnel test to generate a customized display of newly acquired data in nearly real time. By use of DARWIN, it is possible to display simultaneously, and hence compare, data from different tests or CFD simulations — even from tests performed at different sites or simulations performed on different computers. DARWIN is characterized by a three-tier (server/server/client) architecture: In a wind tunnel or at a CFD site, there is a secure server computer that houses the meta-data and the raw test data. The secure server transmits data files (only) to a central DARWIN server, which interacts with users and processes data according to users' requests while preserving the security of the archives.