NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility
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| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | 1982 |
| Preceding agencies |
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| Headquarters |
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California 37°25′16″N 122°03′53″E / 37.42111°N 122.06472°E |
| Agency executive |
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| Parent department | Ames Research Center Exploration Technology Directorate |
| Parent agency | National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) |
| Website | www |
| Current Supercomputing Systems | |
| Pleiades | SGI Altix ICE supercluster |
| Endeavour | SGI UV shared-memory system |
| Merope | SGI Altix supercluster |
The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division is located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It has been the major supercomputing and modeling and simulation resource for NASA missions in aerodynamics, space exploration, studies in weather patterns and ocean currents, and space shuttle and aircraft design and development for over thirty years.
The facility currently houses the petascale Pleiades and terascale Endeavour supercomputers based on SGI architecture and Intel processors, as well as disk and archival tape storage systems with a capacity of over 126 petabytes of data, the hyperwall visualization system, and one of the largest InfiniBand network fabrics in the world. The NAS Division is part of NASA's Exploration Technology Directorate and operates NASA's High-End Computing Capability (HECC) Project.
In the mid-1970s, a group of aerospace engineers at Ames Research Center began to look into transferring aerospace research and development from costly and time-consuming wind tunnel testing to simulation-based design and engineering using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models on supercomputers more powerful than those commercially available at the time. This endeavor was later named the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulator (NAS) Project and the first computer was installed at the Central Computing Facility at Ames Research Center in 1984.
Groundbreaking on a state-of-the-art supercomputing facility took place on March 14, 1985 in order to construct a building where CFD experts, computer scientists, visualization specialists, and network and storage engineers could be under one roof in a collaborative environment. In 1986, NAS transitioned into a full-fledged NASA division and in 1987, NAS staff and equipment, including a second supercomputer, a Cray-2 named Navier, were relocated to the new facility, which was dedicated on March 9, 1987.
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