ABOUT US

For several decades, high-end computing has played an important role in supporting NASA's missions, with advancements as broad as

• simulating NASA and commercial space exploration vehicles,
• designing next-generation aircraft and air traffic control systems,
• analyzing massive Earth systems data to understand potential near- and long-term changes, and
• developing astrophysical calculations to explore the history and future of our universe.

Today, NASA's High-End Computing (HEC) Program maintains a comprehensive set of resources and services for the agency's four Mission Directorates, the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, external collaborators, and the nation. By closely partnering with each Mission Directorate, the HEC Program addresses their specific resource requirements and user needs. Mission support includes ensuring reliable remote access for a user community spread broadly across NASA centers and partner organizations nationwide.

Linked by high-speed networks, NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program Facilities serve agency-sponsored researchers nationwide.

The HEC Program combines high-end computing facilities and services currently located within the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Facility at Ames Research Center and the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at Goddard Space Flight Center. NAS serves the broad spectrum of NASA customers, while NCCS focuses on the Science community. Together, these facilities provide more than 700,000 processor cores and over 30 quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating point-operations per second (petaflops) peak of computing power to the NASA user community. The HEC Program manages these investments by providing high-level oversight and guidance.

The NAS and NCCS facilities have a long history of providing users with advanced computational technologies, mass storage solutions, network solutions, and other cutting-edge tools and technologies for solving today's science and engineering problems. Ames has been a leader in computational fluid dynamics and thermal protection systems, and Goddard has been a leader in climate and weather modeling research. NASA is dedicated to continuing this tradition of scientific and technical excellence with the broader HEC Program.