Press Room

NASA's out-of-this-world science, engineering, and technology demonstrations at SC19 provide the fuel for launching your news items, blog posts, interviews, and feature articles.

Press Releases and Announcements

November 22, 2019

Predicting Extreme Acoustic Vibrations to Keep Astronauts Safe During Launch

The Orion spacecraft will carry the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024 and return them safely back to Earth. Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center ran first-of-a-kind simulations on Orion’s launch abort system (LAS) on the Electra supercomputer to help reduce risk and ensure the safety of astronauts if a life-threatening event arises during launch. Read more…

November 20, 2019

At SC19: Bespoke Supercomputing for Climate and Weather

NASA approached Hyperion Research to explore options for bespoke HPC solutions targeted at weather and climate research. At SC19, Hyperion’s Bob Sorenson explained the study surveying 15 weather and climate organizations in the U.S. and Europe and major HPC suppliers. Read more…

November 20, 2019

Illuminating the Gas Between Galaxies with Supercomputing

Galaxies contain millions of stars, and they grow by pulling in gas to make even more. How gases ebb and flow between galaxies and their surroundings is an essential question that NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer is helping to answer for researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University. Read more…

November 19, 2019

NASA’s All-Electric X-57 X-Plane: A Cleaner Way to Fly

Just as electric cars are becoming more and more commonplace on our roads each day, aerospace engineers are seeking to make electric air transportation a reality. NASA engineers are using supercomputers to accurately predict flight conditions for the agency’s X-57 “Maxwell” electric experimental aircraft’s flight simulator. Read more…

November 18, 2019

A Cloudy Martian Night, Through the Eyes of a Supercomputer

As NASA’s Curiosity rover makes its way over the surface of Mars, it’s sometimes accompanied by clouds drifting by in the sky above. The NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames Research Center provides Mars researchers with the necessary computing power to produce high-resolution data visualizations to study how the planet’s atmosphere works, in fine detail. Read more…

Aspen Systems to Boost Performance of NASA NCCS Discover Supercomputer

Today Aspen Systems announced that the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight has increased the computational power to their primary computing platform—the Discover supercomputer—by over an incredible 30%. Read more…

November 12, 2019

NASA to Showcase Science and Engineering Achievements at Annual Supercomputing Conference

From surveying life on Earth to exploring the far reaches of space, researchers from across NASA and university and industry partners will highlight their latest findings, made possible by the agency’s supercomputers, at SC19—the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, Nov. 18 to 22 in Denver, Colorado. Read more…

November 12, 2019

Accelerating Fine-Scale Forest Modeling Across the North American Boreal Zone

NASA scientists are using high-performance computing resources at the NCCS to test and accelerate forest modeling and achieve a better understanding of forest response to climate change and wildfires. Read more…

November 8, 2019

Scientists Run Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean Simulations at Groundbreaking Resolutions on NASA Supercomputers

Using NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Facility and NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) supercomputers, NASA and university scientists are running simulations with a new coupled atmosphere-ocean model to study swirls of ocean water called eddies. Read more…

November 6, 2019

From Wind to Data, in No Time Flat

Collaborating with supercomputing and visualization experts at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility, aerospace engineers at Ames Research Center linked wind-tunnel test data with the Pleiades supercomputer for near-real-time processing and display of pressure-sensitive paint data, to help speed spacecraft and aircraft design. Read more…

October 28, 2019

NASA’s Newest Petascale Supercomputer Released to Users

The first in a series of planned supercomputing modules located at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley was turned over to scientific and engineering users running production-level computing jobs on October 21, 2019. The expansion of supercomputing resources linked to Ames’ NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility will help meet the agency’s ever-increasing demand for supercomputing resources.

The 3.69 (peak) petaflop system, named Aitken, is based on the success of the prototype Electra system, NASA’s first module-based supercomputer that was initially deployed in 2016. Both modular systems use energy-efficient cooling technology that takes advantage of the San Francisco Bay Area’s temperate weather—to save millions of gallons of water and kilowatt-hours of power each year.

October 23, 2019

Google and NASA Achieve Quantum Supremacy

The advanced techniques used to simulate quantum computations—essential tools in the path to quantum supremacy—were developed with help from NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division experts and the Pleiades and Electra supercomputers at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Eleanor Rieffel, who leads the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) at Ames, will co-present the SC19 tutorial Introduction to Quantum Computing on Sunday, Nov. 17 from 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. in Room 205. During the conference, QuAIL research scientist Salvatore Mandra will present Achieving Quantum Supremacy with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Devices in the NASA Hyperwall Theater (booth #655).