About NAS
The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division is enabling advances in high-end computing technologies and in modeling and simulations methods to tackle some of the toughest science and engineering challenges facing NASA today.
For more than 25 years, the name "NAS" has been associated with leadership and innovation throughout the high-end computing (HEC) community. We play a significant role in shaping HEC standards and paradigms, and provide leadership in the areas of large-scale InfiniBand fabrics, Lustre open-source filesystems, and hyperwall technologies.
We provide an integrated high-end computing environment to accelerate NASA missions and make revolutionary advances in science. Pleiades, a petaflop-scale supercomputer, supplies some of the world's most powerful HEC resources to scientists throughout the U.S., and is currently ranked the 7th most powerful system in the world.
One of our key focus areas is in modeling and simulation to support NASA's real-world engineering applications and make fundamental advances in modeling and simulations methods.
NAS Division Goals
The division's high-level goals are:
- Provide effective, production-level HEC resources and services to enable significant, timely impacts across NASA's mission areas of Earth and space science, aeronautics research, and human and robotic space exploration.
- Advance the state-of-the-art in HEC technologies and techniques to meet NASA's continuously growing requirements for advanced computational modeling, simulation, and analysis.
- Design and conduct high-fidelity numerical simulation studies for NASA's aerospace engineering programs, supporting both mission-critical and system design decisions.
- Pursue fundamental advances in numerical methodologies and algorithms, physical model enhancements, and applications code development for large-scale simulations of interest to NASA.
- Integrate and operate IT systems to enable successful missions for specific NASA science and engineering projects.
Where We Fit at NASA
The NAS Division is part of the Exploration Technology Directorate at Ames Research Center. The Directorate's mission is to create innovative and reliable technologies for NASA missions.
NAS operates NASA's High-End Computing Capability Project, which is funded through the agency's High-End Computing Program and its Strategic Capabilities Assets Program.
NAS Mission
To deliver a world-class, high-end computing environment and modeling and simulation capabilities that enable NASA to improve aerospace technology, safely conduct human and robotic space exploration, and advance our knowledge of Earth and the universe beyond.
