Stanford Engineering Library Blog

American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Standards are now available online.

ASTM International is an international standards developing organization that develops and publishes voluntary technical standards for a wide range of materials, products, systems, and services. ASTM International develops standards using a consensus process.

ASTM International was formed in 1898 in the United States as the American Society for Testing and Materials by a group of scientists and engineers, led by Charles Benjamin Dudley, to address the frequent rail breaks plaguing the fast-growing railroad industry. The group developed a standard for the steel used to fabricate rails. It predates other standards organizations such as BSI (1901), DIN (1917) and AFNOR (1926), but differs from these in that it is not a national standards body, that role being taken in the USA by ANSI. However, it has a dominant role among standards developers in the USA, and claims to be the world's largest developer of standards.

Today, ASTM International supports thousands of technical committees, which draw their members from around the world and collectively maintain more than 12,000 standards. The quality of the standard test methods is such that they are frequently used world-wide, even in places where ASTM specifications are not used.

6 August 2007—NASA’s latest Mars mission launched this past Saturday after being delayed for a day due to inclement weather. The Phoenix lander, scheduled to descend onto the Red Planet next May, carries instruments that will aid the quest to try to find evidence of life beneath the planet’s icy arctic region.

Despite all the attention given to the possibility of finding life on our planetary neighbor, Phoenix is only the first Mars lander properly equipped to do such identification and analysis since the 1976 Viking mission. It will land in Vastitas Borealis, the arctic plains of Mars, and will spend more than 90 days investigating the history of water on Mars, assessing whether the planet could have ever supported life, and examining weather and climate near the pole.

Phoenix is fitted with a robotic arm for digging trenches and collecting soil samples. The arm features a camera to capture detailed images of soil before and after it has been scooped up. The lander also carries a stereoscopic imager to capture full panoramas; electrical, chemical, and microscopy tools to analyze samples; and temperature and pressure sensors for meteorological observation. Phoenix’s brain is a radiation-hardened computer made by BAE Systems, at the heart of which is an IBM microprocessor.

Phoenix will be the first lander to communicate with Earth by relaying its messages through the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which features the new Electra UHF relay transceiver, an attempt at providing higher bandwidth for space communications. -- Story source: IEEE Spectrum

Selected Engineering Library Resources:

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego have constructed the highest-resolution computer display in the world – with a screen resolution up to 220 million pixels.

The system located at the UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) links to Calit2’s building at UC Irvine, which boasts the previous record holder. The combination – known as the Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Space (HIPerSpace) – can deliver real-time rendered graphics simultaneously across 420 million pixels to audiences in Irvine and San Diego.

The new HIPerSpace system between Irvine and San Diego is joined together via high-performance, dedicated optical networking that clocks in at up to two gigabits per second (2Gbps). The systems use the same type of graphics rendering technology, from industry partner NVIDIA. The “graphics super cluster” being developed at UCSD consists of 80 NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 graphics processing units (GPUs). “The graphics and computational performance of these cards is quite astounding,” said Kuester. “Putting the theoretical computational performance of the cluster at almost 40 teraflops. To put that into context, the top-rated supercomputer in the world five years ago was operating at that same speed. While these are purely theoretical numbers, the comparison clearly hints at capabilities of this new cluster that go far beyond generating impressive visual information.”

The processing power will come in handy for the kinds of large-scale applications that are likely to make use of the HIPerSpace system. Calit2 will make the displays available to teams of scientists or engineers dealing with very large data sets, from multiple gigabytes to terabytes, notably in the Earth sciences, climate prediction, biomedical engineering, genomics, and brain imaging. “The higher-resolution displays allow researchers to take in both the broad view of the data and the minutest details, all at the same time,” said Kuester.

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