+ Home > About Us > Facilities & Services > NAS Facility Overview
NASA ADVANCED SUPERCOMPUTING (NAS) FACILITY OVERVIEW
NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. Photo by Pat Elson.
The NAS facility at Ames Research Center was established in the early 1980s by Congress with a charter to provide high-end computing capabilities for performing numerical simulations of proposed commercial and military aircraft designs. Since then, NAS has continually adapted to meet NASA’s changing needs. In mid-2004, NAS acquired a world-class supercomputer named Columbia. The sponsorship for NAS is from the High-End Computing Capability (HECC) Project, which is funded through the Strategic Capabilities Assests Program and managed by the High-End Computing (HEC) Program. Since Columbia's installation, the HEC Program has made substantial upgrades to the system to enhance performance and better facilitate groundbreaking science and engineering in support of all four NASA mission directorates.
NAS’ integrated resource and service offerings include high-speed networks, archival storage systems, system performance and application optimization, 24x7 user services operations, data analysis, and scientific visualization. In parallel with Columbia's growth, NAS continually develops advanced visualization techniques. NAS is currently deploying a cutting-edge visualization system, hyperwall-2, which will be connected directly to Columbia, allowing scientists to run more sophisticated concurrent visualizations.
Due to intense utilization of Columbia by all four missions, NAS is currently evaluating next-generation architectures to meet the agency's growing supercomputing requirements.
