NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility

NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility
Name	NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility
Caption	The main building at NASA Ames Research Center housing the facility.
Established	1987
Location	Moffett Federal Airfield, Mountain View, California
Parent organization	NASA
Director	William Thigpen
Operating system	Linux
Website	https://www.nas.nasa.gov

NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility. The NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility operates as the agency's primary high-performance computing center, providing critical computational resources to scientists and engineers across the United States. Located at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, it supports missions for the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and next-generation projects like the Space Launch System and the James Webb Space Telescope. The facility is renowned for its leadership in developing and deploying some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, enabling breakthroughs in computational fluid dynamics, earth science, and aerospace engineering.

Overview

The facility serves as the cornerstone for NASA's computational research, managing the agency's central high-performance computing assets including the Pleiades and Aitken systems. Its operations are integral to the NASA Engineering and Safety Center and support the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Glenn Research Center, and Langley Research Center. By providing immense processing power, it accelerates complex simulations for aeronautics, climate modeling, and astrophysics, directly contributing to the success of missions like the Mars Science Laboratory and the Orion program. The center also pioneers advancements in data visualization and network architecture through its NASA Center for Climate Simulation and collaborations with the Department of Energy.

History

The facility's origins trace to the establishment of the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation program in 1987, which aimed to provide a national resource for computational simulation. Early milestones included the installation of the Cray Y-MP and the groundbreaking Cray C90, which positioned NASA Ames Research Center as a leader in supercomputing. Throughout the 1990s, it deployed systems like the SGI Altix and collaborated with Intel on the Columbia system, named in memory of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. The launch of the Pleiades supercomputer in 2008 marked a significant expansion, followed by the deployment of the Aitken module in 2019, continually pushing the boundaries of petaflop and exascale computing.

Computing Systems

The core computational power is delivered by the Pleiades system, a SGI-built machine featuring Intel Xeon processors and NVIDIA graphics processing units, consistently ranked among the most powerful in the world. The modular Aitken supercomputer, housed in an innovative energy-efficient modular data center, represents the next phase of architecture. These systems utilize a high-speed InfiniBand interconnect and massive parallel file systems like Lustre for data management. Supporting software includes the Portable Batch System scheduler and applications such as OVERFLOW and FUN3D, which are essential for simulating hypersonic flight and rocket engine combustion.

Research and Applications

Research spans multiple NASA mission directorates, with aeronautics teams using the facility for high-fidelity simulations of the X-59 QueSST and Boeing 777 aircraft to reduce noise and improve efficiency. Earth science applications include running the Goddard Earth Observing System model to predict hurricane tracks and assess climate change impacts. For space exploration, scientists simulate atmospheric entry for the Mars 2020 rover and model the complex plume-surface interaction for the Artemis program lunar landings. Astrophysics research leverages the systems to interpret data from the Hubble Space Telescope and model galactic collisions, contributing to our understanding of dark matter.

Facility and Infrastructure

The primary complex is situated at Moffett Federal Airfield within the NASA Ames Research Center, featuring specialized buildings with robust power and cooling infrastructures. The facility employs advanced cooling technologies, including a patented liquid cooling system for the Aitken module that significantly reduces water usage. It is connected via the NASA Research and Education Network and the Energy Sciences Network to other national labs like the Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The infrastructure also includes the Hyperwall visualization system, allowing researchers to analyze petabytes of data from projects like the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer.

Partnerships and Collaborations

The facility maintains deep collaborations with other federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for weather modeling and the Federal Aviation Administration for air traffic management simulations. It partners with industry leaders such as Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and NVIDIA on hardware co-design and software optimization for exascale systems. Academic partnerships with institutions like Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign foster cutting-edge research in quantum computing and machine learning. These collaborations are often formalized through the NASA Research Announcement process and shared resources with the Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project.

Category:NASA facilities Category:Supercomputer sites Category:Buildings and structures in Mountain View, California Category:1987 establishments in California