NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division

NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division
Agency overview
Formed1982 (1982)
Preceding agencies
  • Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation Division (1982)
  • Numerical Aerospace Simulation Division (1995)
HeadquartersNASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California
37°25′16″N 122°03′53″W / 37.42111°N 122.06472°W / 37.42111; -122.06472
Agency executive
  • Piyush Mehrotra, Division Chief
Parent departmentAmes Research Center Exploration Technology Directorate
Parent agencyNational Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Websitewww.nas.nasa.gov
Current Supercomputing Systems
Pleiades SGI/HPE ICE X supercluster
Aitken[1] HPE E-Cell system
Electra[2] SGI/HPE ICE X & HPE E-Cell system
Endeavour SGI UV shared-memory system
Merope[3] 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 almost forty years.

The facility currently houses the petascale Pleiades, Aitken, and Electra supercomputers, as well as the terascale Endeavour supercomputer. The systems are based on SGI and HPE architecture with Intel processors. The main building also houses disk and archival tape storage systems with a capacity of over an exabyte of data, the hyperwall visualization system, and one of the largest InfiniBand network fabrics in the world.[4] The NAS Division is part of NASA's Exploration Technology Directorate and operates NASA's High-End Computing Capability (HECC) Project.[5]

  1. ^ "Aitken Supercomputer homepage". NAS.
  2. ^ "Electra Supercomputer homepage". NAS.
  3. ^ "Merope Supercomputer homepage". NAS.
  4. ^ "NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division: Advanced Computing" (PDF). NAS. 2019.
  5. ^ "NAS Homepage - About the NAS Division". NAS.