NASA High-End Computing: Feature Stories

10.04.22 - Ocean-Atmosphere Mashup: A Recipe for Climate Predictions: What happens when scientists cook up a new recipe for understanding the workings of our planet? That’s what two teams studying Earth’s oceans and atmosphere decided to find out—with help from visualization experts in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division and the agency’s high-performance computing (HPC) resources.

09.29.22 - GMAO and NCCS Provide Forecasts for 10 NASA Field Campaigns: This year, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) and NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) are providing near real-time atmospheric weather and chemistry forecasts for 10 NASA field campaigns — the largest number of supported campaigns since 2017.

09.23.22 - Scientists Trace High-Energy Particles Back to Sun's Plasma: Scientists may have discovered how and when high-energy particles that bombard Earth and other objects emerge from violent environments such as the Sun's atmosphere. The new research, based on simulations run on supercomputers at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility and other supercomputing centers, may lead to better predictions of the origin of solar energetic particles and improve forecasting models of space weather events, a key goal of NASA and other agencies and governments around the globe.

09.23.22 - Meteor Hunt: New Research Reveals the Life and Death of a Space Rock: New research by an astronomer at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames tells a 2008 meteorite’s origin story. To understand the wide track of meteroid fall patterns from asteroid 2008 TC3, the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division’s Darrel Robertson, in support of the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project at Ames, performed computer modeling to decode this pattern.

9.21.22 - ICCFD11 Proceedings Now Availabler: Proceedings of the ICCFD11 Conference are now available. Co-hosted by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division, the 11th International Conference on Computational Fluid Dynamics (ICCFD) was held on the island of Maui July 11-15. Researchers and experts around the world shared innovative new tools and CFD research advancing our understanding of complex flow physics.

09.13.22 - Persistence is Key – Bianca Ortega: Former NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) intern Bianca Ortega worked on a project titled "Applications of Data Visualization and Machine Learning to HPC Logs" and is now a senior at Kean University in New Jersey double majoring in Computational Science and Mathematics, and minoring in Applied Physics.

09.06.22 - NASA Supercomputing at SiliCon with Adam Savage: The NASA booth drew large crowds interested in supercomputing and our cool visualizations at SiliCon, August 26-27 at the San Jose Convention Center. Two talks by NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division experts were standing-room only: "Artemis: The First Step in the Next Era of Human Exploration," with Derek Dalle, and "Getting Your Start at NASA: All About Internships Across the Agency" with Ashley Coates.

08.30.22 - How a Desert Sparrow Inspired a Third-Year Medical Student to Become a NASA Climate Informatics Scientist Using High-End Computers: A childhood encounter with Cassin’s Sparrow near his West Texas home set John Schnase on a career path that ultimately led him to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where he found his footing as a climate informatics scientist using a unique combination of field observations, remotely sensed data, climate data, and computers to design information systems enabling a wide range of ecological and environmental research studies.

08.19.22 - NCCS Enables NASA, MIT, and Citizen Scientists to Discover Nearly 100 Eclipsing Quadruple Star Systems in TESS Telescope Data: NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) computing systems enabled NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and citizen scientists to discover nearly 100 eclipsing quadruple star systems from observations by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) telescope.

08.17.22 - NASA Summer Series: MUSE: Revealing the Physics of the Sun’s Corona and the Roots of Space Weather: Join NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) user Bart De Pontieu, when he presents, “MUSE: Revealing the Physics of the Sun’s Corona and the Roots of Space Weather,” on August 23 at 11 a.m. Pacific Time, as part of the 2022 NASA Summer Series. De Pontieu will discuss NASA’s Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE) mission, which will improve our understanding of the physical processes that drive solar flares and eruptions.

08.17.22 - Doing More With Less: NASA’s Most Powerful Supercomputer: NASA is committed to reducing the environmental impact of its labs and facilities. The latest expansion to NASA’s innovative Modular Supercomputing Facility increased NASA’s computational power by 22%, making it the agency’s most powerful, yet energy-efficient, supercomputer.

08.17.22 - Deep Concern About Food Security in Eastern Africa: The NASA Hydrological Forecast and Analysis System (NHyFAS) running at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) generates and analyzes data on moisture at the land surface and in the top few centimeters of soil to show existing conditions and to predict them for upcoming months so that farmers and agriculture agencies can prepare for deficits or surpluses.

08.11.22 - GMAO Explores Hunga Tonga Volcano Eruption and Atmospheric Rivers: NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) used a new composition reanalysis to study water vapor from the Hunga Tonga volcano eruption and weather reanalyses to detect atmospheric rivers. The projects leveraged NASA High-End Computing resources at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

08.02.22 - NAS Team Collaborates on Asteroid Impact Simulations for Planetary Defense: NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division researchers on the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project (ATAP) at Ames Research Center play a key role in ongoing planetary defense and asteroid threat exercises conducted with governmental and international organizations. Recently, the ATAP team participated in a technical interchange meeting on Asteroid Impact Global Effects, and published a paper, “Apophis Planetary Defense Campaign.” The team runs simulations on NAS facility supercomputers to estimate the severity and likelihood of damage that could result from potential asteroid impacts on Earth.

07.28.22 - Generation Z Interns Light Up NASA Goddard as CISTO Celebrates National Intern Day 2022!: To honor National Intern Day on July 28, 2022, the NASA High-End Computing Program at Goddard Space Flight Center introduces six summer 2022 NASA interns working in various groups across the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office (CISTO).

07.22.22 - NCCS-Enabled Simulations of Massive Ancient Volcanic Eruption Show Unexpected Climate Warming: In an interdisciplinary collaboration, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center planetary and Earth scientists leveraged the Goddard Earth Observing System Chemistry-Climate Model (GEOSCCM) and the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) to simulate an ancient, massive volcanic eruption in the Columbia River Basalt Group region of the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

07.19.22 - Aitken Leaps Over Pleiades to Become NASA’s Most Powerful Supercomputer: With its latest expansion, the Aitken supercomputer became NASA’s most powerful high-performance computing (HPC) system—surpassing the agency’s longtime HPC workhorse, Pleiades, which held the title for 14 years after its deployment in 2008. Aitken is a key resource for hundreds of researchers working on projects across all of NASA’s mission directorates, including aerospace engineers at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility who contribute to the Artemis Program by simulating the launch environment at Kennedy Space Center.

07.15.22 - July 20: Last Day to Apply for the GPU Hackathon: Consider applying to participate in the 2022 NASA GPU Hackathon to be held on September 19 and September 26-28. Whether your code is a traditional high-performance computing (HPC) centric application or if your goal focuses on artificial intelligence/machine learning technologies, please apply to participate in this event!.

07.11.22 - NASA Summer Series: Modeling Entry Systems to Explore Our Solar System: Join NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) user Michael Barnhardt when he presents, “Modeling Entry Systems to Explore Our Solar System,” on July 14 at 11am Pacific Time/2pm Eastern Time, as part of the 2022 NASA Summer Series. Modeling and simulation are critical tools for designing a vehicle that will work the first time, every time. Barnhardt will discuss the latest research in modeling entry systems—enabled by NASA high-end computing resources—and how it is being used in NASA’s exploration missions

06.29.2022 - How a College Student Turned Pandemic Restrictions into an Opportunity to Conduct Research Using NASA Supercomputers: The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) interviewed Henry Bowman, a physics major at Carleton College who kept learning during COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns by starting an international research project using data analyzed with NCCS supercomputing resources and became first author on a published paper.

06.14.22 - Visualizing Mechanisms for Making Water on the Moon: Physicists at Princeton University are running simulations on the Pleiades and Electra supercomputers to trace the origin of water on the Moon. Their research illustrates a possible mechanism for lunar hydration: ionized oxygen transported by Earth’s magnetic field. To help the researchers gain insight into their complex computational results, NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) visualization experts produced animations that help convey a dynamic system of ionized oxygen deposits.

06.14.22 - NCCS-Hosted Simulations Probe the Interactions of the Freshwater Yukon River and the Salty Arctic Ocean: The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Discover supercomputer powered a model NASA Goddard Space Flight Center scientists developed to simulate the physical properties and transport of water in the lower Yukon River and Northern Bering Sea — water that ultimately reaches the freshest of the world’s major oceans, the Arctic Ocean.

05.31.22 - Simulating Supersonic Parachute Inflation for Future Mars Landings: As shown by GEOS model forecasts run at the NCCS, April 2017 Middle East flooding resulted from a "dusty atmospheric river” attributed to major mineral dust sources in the region.

05.26.22 - Simulating Algae to Model Water Quality in Minutes: Researchers on the Biospheric Science team at NASA Ames Research Center use NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) systems to calculate the optical properties of water containing algae and other phytoplankton species—a key to determining the degree of water contamination and modeling water quality. Recently, NAS experts helped the team speed up their simulations, reducing the time required to perform calculations for single alga particle from two hours to just 18 minutes.

05.25.22 - NCCS User Spotlight: Goutam Konapala: As part of NASA’s celebration of Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month, this spotlight shines on NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) user Goutam Konapala. We follow Konapala from his childhood in an Indian village to his computational research on Earth’s water cycle with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Biospheric Sciences Laboratory and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

05.17.22 - Simulations Give New Insights into Magnetic Fields of Red Dwarfs: Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder/JILA ran massively parallel 3D simulations on NASA's Pleiades supercomputer to study the dynamics in the interiors of red dwarfs, also known as M-dwarf stars. Their simulations results show a link between the star’s convective cycles, or the heat cycles in a star’s atmosphere, and its magnetic fields. Previous research results were highlighted at NASA’s SC21 exhibit.

05.13.22 - Satellites, the Space Race, and Supercomputing: How NASA Goddard’s Beowulf Cluster Computer Became an Award-Winning Space Technology: On April 7, Beowulf Cluster Computing was inducted into the Space Technology Hall of Fame. The Beowulf computer cluster was a breakthrough at NASA that enabled many other innovations. Virtually every area of science, math, and biology continue to be direct beneficiaries of this groundbreaking work.

05.11.22 - A Dusty Atmospheric River Brings Floods to the Middle East: As shown by GEOS model forecasts run at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), April 2017 Middle East flooding resulted from a "dusty atmospheric river” attributed to major mineral dust sources in the region.

05.02.22 - Apply Now for the 2022 NASA GPU Hackathon: If you’re thinking about porting to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) or if your NASA HPC or AI/ML application is already using GPUs and you could use help getting to that next level of performance, consider applying to participate in the 2022 NASA GPU Hackathon that will be held on September 19 and September 26-28. Applications are due by July 20, 2022.

05.02.22 - NASA Simulation Suggests Some Volcanoes Might Warm Climate, Destroy Ozone Layer: A new NASA climate simulation suggests that extremely large volcanic eruptions called “flood basalt eruptions” might significantly warm Earth’s climate and devastate the ozone layer that shields life from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. The simulation ran at the NASA High-End Computing Program’s NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

04.29.22 - Scientists Simulate the Birthplaces of Planetary Systems on the NCCS Discover Supercomputer: Harnessing the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), scientists from the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and University of Utah simulated the evolution of cosmic disks of dust and rocks — the birthplaces of planetary systems.

04.28.22 - NASA Mentors Students to Achieve High Performance in Supercomputing Competition: Talented students from communities around the U.S. recently gained hands-on experience in high-performance computing, NASA style. With help from experts in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) division at the agency’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, the students took part in a supercomputing competition.

04.22.22 - HPC Students and NASA Mentors: A Winning Combination: Talented students from diverse communities around the U.S. gained hands-on experience in supercomputing in the second annual Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition, with help from high-performance computing (HPC) experts in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

04.22.22 - From Supercomputers to Symbiotes, NASA in Silicon Valley Invests in the Earth: On Earth Day, NASA Ames highlights programs that are helping to understand, mitigate, and prepare for Earth’s changing climate. The NAS Division's Modular Supercomputing Facility takes advantage of the local climate to cool the Aitken and Electra systems that help scientists make new discoveries about our planet.

04.22.22 - Every Day is Earth Day at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation: The theme of Earth Day 2022 is "Investing in Earth." A significant investment in understanding Earth has already been made with the creation of the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 1990, where every day is Earth Day.

04.15.22 - NASA Spotlights Its Galaxy of HPC Activities: "HPC Matters!" was the big, bold title of a talk by Piyush Mehrotra, division chief of NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center, during the meeting of the HPC Advisory Council at Stanford last week. HPCwire Editor Oliver Peckham covered details of the talk, Mehrotra offered a glimpse into the state of supercomputing at NASA—and how its systems are being applied to agency missions, including Artemis missions that land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon.

04.13.22 - Student Cluster Competition Award Winners to be Announced on April 15: Winners of the 2022 Winter Classic Invitational competition will be announced at an awards ceremony to be livestreamed on April 15 at 4:00pm Pacific Time. Register now for this webinar that will recognize the student teams from Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic Serving Institutions. In the meantime, you can watch a video where NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division mentors discussed their role in guiding students through hands-on exercises using NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer.

04.12.22 - GMAO Science Snapshots on Eurasia Warmth and Antarctic Atmospheric Blocking Event: Using NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) resources, NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) scientists have gained new insights into exceptional warmth over Eurasia during January-February-March 2020 as well as an atmospheric blocking event that shattered temperature records in East Antarctica in March 2022.

03.31.22 - NASA Science Enables First-of-its-Kind Detection of Reduced Human CO2 Emissions: For the first time, researchers have spotted short-term, regional fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) across the globe due to emissions from human activities. Using a combination of NASA satellites and atmospheric modeling at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), the scientists performed a first-of-its-kind detection of human CO2 emissions changes.

03.23.22 - NCCS User Spotlight: Allison Collow: As part of NASA’s Women’s History Month celebration, this spotlight shines on NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) user Allison Collow. We follow Collow’s career from her college and graduate school years at Rutgers University to her recent work researching aerosols and atmospheric rivers with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).

03.21.22 - Ames' Contributions to the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology Aircraft: NASA's Ames Research Center has decades of experience researching supersonic flight, a lot of which has gone into the unique design of the X-59. As Lockheed Martin Skunk Works finalized the X-59 airplane’s design, they ran their ideas using Ames-developed high-resolution, 3D simulation software on multiple supercomputers at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility – Pleiades, Electra, and Endeavour.

03.16.22 - Using the Power of Global Air Quality Models and NCCS Supercomputing Resources, NYU and NASA Collaborators Create a Novel Index to Communicate Children’s Respiratory Health Risk: New York University and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center researchers collaborated on a study developing a health index using global air quality models and the high-end computing resources of the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS). This index can be used to inform communities, mitigate risk, and improve respiratory health outcomes in children.

02.28.22 - NCCS Helps NASA Scientists Create New Global Ozone Profile Reaching from Earth’s Surface to the Mesosphere: With key support from the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center scientists have created a new, multidecade global ozone profile climatology that reaches from Earth’s surface up to 80 kilometers (~50 miles) — far into the mesosphere, the third layer of the atmosphere.

02.22.22 - NAS Division Experts Add GPU Support to USGS Earthquake Modeling Code: NASA Advanced Supercompting (NAS) Division experts are working with researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to assess potential benefits of running their Cascading Adaptive Transitional Metropolis in Parallel (CATMIP) application on GPU nodes. In tests, the code ran more than 20 times faster on GPUs than on traditional CPU-only nodes. CATMIP is used to model and study earthquake faults.

02.18.22 - NCCS Celebrates Black History Month: NASA Pioneers Inspire a New Generation at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center: As NASA continues its celebration of Black History Month, the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) recalls the legacy of three Black Americans whose pioneering work is significantly impacting NASA and inspiring new generations of African-American innovators at NASA and beyond.

02.11.22 - Investigating the Utility of Hyperspectral Sounders in the 9.6 Micrometer Band to Improve Ozone Analyses: Tropospheric and stratospheric ozone plays important roles in the Earth system and humanity's survival within it. The addition of 9.6 micrometer radiances to NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office’s systems may reduce ozone biases in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere, as shown in work carried out at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

02.08.22 - Simulations of Dynamo Action in M-Dwarf Stars: A recent paper by researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder shows that new global magnetohydrodynamic simulations of rapidly rotating M-Dwarf stars, run on NAS supercomputers, produced convective nests. This previously unseen phenomena might contribute to the formation of persistant active longitudes scientists have observed on the Sun and other stars. The Boulder team's related work was highlighted as a NASA@SC21 research project.

02.02.22 - Study Extends Period When Mars Could Have Supported Life: Billions of years ago, when life emerged on Earth, the climate of Mars could have been Earth-like as well, with a thicker atmosphere than today and oceans of liquid water. This period could have lasted longer than originally thought, as indicated by a simulation using the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) ROCKE-3D Global Climate Model and run at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

01.31.22 - NCCS Plays Crucial Roles in Preparing the NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s Wide Field Instrument for Integration and Testing: As the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope prepares for operations, the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) continues playing critical roles in developing NASA’s next major space observatory — the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

01.27.22 - Paul Lang’s NASA Legacy: The Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office’s (CISTO) High-End Computer Networking (HECN) team and the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues reflect back on the four-decade NASA legacy of Paul Lang, a nationally recognized expert in high-performance networking.

01.19.22 - NCCS and Partners Presenting in the Virtual 2022 American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting: Researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) and Earth Sciences Division (ESD) and a variety of academic and research partner organizations are presenting in the 102nd American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting, being held virtually 23–27 January 2022.

01.13.22 - When Water is Coming from All Sides: Researchers at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration teamed up with colleagues at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at William & Mary to develop and test the world's first three-dimensional operational storm surge model. The research was enabled by supercomputers at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility and the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

01.09.22 - The Many Faces of the Stratosphere: The stratospheric flow patterns on a global scale can sometimes resemble faces. NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office presents four examples that they have encountered in the stratosphere while examining EPV (Ertel Potential Vorticity) fields from the MERRA-2 reanalysis run at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

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