Press Room

News and Announcements

November 15, 2023

Modeling Turbofan Engines to Understand Aircraft Noise

Airplane engines are loud—just ask anyone who lives near an airport. Using the Pleiades supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at the agency’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, researchers have developed software that can model different engine configurations in a more timely and economic manner. Read More about the role of NASA high-end computing in reducing aircraft noise.

November 14, 2023

Rocket Exhaust on the Moon: NASA Supercomputers Reveal Surface Effects

Through Artemis, NASA plans to explore more of the Moon than ever before with human and robotic missions on the lunar surface. Researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center ran simulations on high-end computing systems at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility to help mission planners better understand how future spacecraft engine plumes will interact with the Moon’s surface. Read More about the role of NASA high end computing in future missions to the Moon.

November 13, 2023

Five Ways NASA Supercomputing Takes Missions from Concept to Reality

NASA high-end computing plays a key role in taking many agency missions from concept to application in the real world. From increasing accuracy of global weather forecasts, to designs for future air taxis, to parachute design tests for landing spacecraft, our supercomputing resources and experts are driving science and engineering advances for the benefit of humanity. Read More about five ways NASA supercomputing supports agency missions.

November 13, 2023

NASA Researchers Participate in SC23 Technical Program

If you're attending SC23 at the Technical Program or Workshop level, you can find NASA high-performance computing experts presenting their work.

• Thursday 3:30pm - 5:00pm: Panel – Computing at the Edge: HPC and AI Supporting Recent US Space Missions
• Friday 8:30pm - 10:00am: Panel – Understanding the Performance, Reproducibility, Validation, Portability, and Sustainability of Coupled HPC Simulation and Deep Learning Calculations

NASA HPC in the News

November 16, 2023

Unlocking Insights into Asteroid Impact Risks: SETI Institute Leverages Weather Satellite Data and AI

To comprehensively understand asteroid impact risks, scientists have relied on limited data sources, including all-sky video camera systems, scattered dashcams, and eyewitness accounts. Scientists at SETI, with partners at NASA, Sandia National Labs, and UC Berkeley developed a machine-learning algorithm to assess the risk of very rare large meteors in Earth’s atmosphere, and utilized systems at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the agency’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Read More about the role of NASA high-end computing in analyzing satellite data.

November 3, 2023

How NASA is Driving Efficiency with Modular Data Centres

NASA High-End Computing Capabilities Project Manager Bill Thigpen shares how NASA is driving efficiency with modular data centers, as part of the Breakthrough collection of interviews with Scientific Computing World. (free registration required to read) Read more about NASA's modular supercomputing initiatives (free registration required to read)

October 9, 2023

Our Moon’s Earliest History Is Still A Puzzle

From Earth, our inner solar system seems to work like clockwork. Mercury, Venus, our Earth-Moon system, and Mars all orbit the Sun in very orderly fashion. But it wasn’t always so. Planetary scientist William Bottke, Southwest Research Institute, led a team that used advanced numerical models to simulate early planetary bombardment, running simulations on NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Read more about this Forbes Innovation Science article.

5 Ways NASA Supercomputing Takes Missions from Concept to Reality

1. Simulating Air Taxi Safety: NASA’s Quadcopter in Ground Effect

   Using NASA’s powerful supercomputers, researchers simulate the performance of several promising designs for air taxi vehicles to carry passengers and cargo in urban and outlying areas.
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   Simulating Air Taxi Safety: NASA’s Quadcopter in Ground Effect

   To support NASA’s development of safe and efficient urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles that may one day offer people air taxi rides, scientists at NASA Ames run simulations to study the performance of UAMs when they operate near the ground.

   The team uses supercomputers at Ames to run complex, high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics simulations that capture in detail the interaction between the rotors, other vehicle components, and the ground surface.

   These simulations enable the scientists to better characterize the vehicle aerodynamics and the rotor-induced flow around the vehicles to detect potentially dangerous areas with high winds and gusts.

   The data collected during the simulations allows the team to predict the change in handling qualities of vehicles close to the ground and to provide guidelines for safe crew and passenger movement in the vicinity of the vehicles.

   Researchers

   Patricia Ventura Diaz, NASA Ames Research Center
   Dennis-Gabriel Caprace, NASA Ames Research Center

2. Convective-Scale Numerical Weather Prediction with the NASA GEOS Models

   Researchers are extending the predictability of severe storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes beyond two days while better representing local impacts from intense precipitation, winds, and heat.
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   Convective-Scale Numerical Weather Prediction with the NASA GEOS Models

   NASA scientists are using the GEOS model to produce convective-scale weather forecasts for the continental United States within a seamless global numerical weather prediction (NWP) system.

   GEOS convective-scale forecasts produce severe storm predictions 1 to 5 days in advance.

   The global nature of this application requires large amounts of high-performance computing; currently these forecasts run in 4.5 hours on 13,000 Intel Cascade Lake nodes of the NASA Center for Climate Simulation’s Discover supercomputer.

   During spring 2023, GEOS convective-scale forecasts yielded similar results as production NWP regional models for severe storms while also showing 5-day global NWP skill comparable to production forecast systems including the GEOS Forward Processing (GEOS-FP) system.

   Researchers

   William Putman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

3. Simulating Capsule Free-Flight for Planetary Entry, Descent and Landing

   Simulating free-flight conditions of space capsules entering planetary atmospheres at hypersonic speeds helps engineers design entry vehicles for planetary exploration.
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   Simulating Capsule Free-Flight for Planetary Entry, Descent and Landing

   NASA designs capsules to survive the intense conditions of entering planetary atmospheres at hypersonic speeds. Capsules are protected from the high temperatures encountered early in their flight trajectories, but can encounter instabilities as they are slowed down by the drag of the planet’s atmosphere.

   To help researchers investigate the vehicles’ flight characteristics, engineers at NASA Ames simulated multiple capsule designs entering planetary atmospheres at high speed.

   These highly complex simulations were performed on NASA’s Pleiades and Electra supercomputers. Results provide insights into dynamic instabilities the vehicles might experience during entry, descent, and landing.

   Simulations such as these help NASA engineers design entry vehicles for planetary exploration, helping ensure the success of NASA missions including the Artemis Program and the upcoming Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

   Researchers

   Kyle Thompson, NASA Langley Research Center
   Justin Haskins, NASA Ames Research Center
   Rathakrishnan Bhaskaran, NASA Ames Research Center
   Dirk Ekelschot, NASA Ames Research Center
   Eric Stern, NASA Ames Research Center

4. From Raw to Awe: Transforming and Depicting Earth Science Data

   A new public installation at NASA Headquarters, the Earth Information Center, displays large visualizations of observational and model data surrounded by smaller portals depicting Earth “vital signs.”
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5. Using Autonomous Onboard Science Agents to Enable Groundbreaking Discoveries

   Researchers are leveraging machine learning and data science to enable science autonomy onboard to support scientists’ decision-making processes for future space missions.
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   Using Autonomous Onboard Science Agents to Enable Groundbreaking Discoveries

   NASA is designing a modular software framework for a future mission to an ocean world that can perform science and engineering actions using a constellation of spacecraft.

   The goals are to: 1) model stable orbits of multiple spacecraft, 2) show that spacecraft can alter their plans reliably and safely, and 3) demonstrate that ‘intelligent’ instruments can respond to new data to enhance science return.

   The NASA Center for Climate Simulation’s Discover supercomputer was used to model and develop algorithms for geochemical and biosignature detection of volatiles, e.g., plumes, emanating from the surface or subsurface using data collected from orbit.

   Using this method, we were able to identify a stable orbit for all spacecraft. We have developed an autonomous onboard science agent that uses multiple, pre-trained models to come to a consensus-based decision about interpreting new data in order to make high-level decisions.

   Researchers

   Bethany Theiling, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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