NASA High-End Computing: Feature Stories

03.27.20 - Women’s History Month: Women of ABoVE: The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) highlights the careers of three Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment women scientists who study climate in the Arctic and Boreal region by building computer models, analyzing satellite data, and conducting fieldwork in remote places:

03.23.20 – NASA Joins COVID-19 HPC Consortium: To help meet the challenge facing the nation and the world, NASA has joined the COVID-19 HPC Consortium, which seeks to empower researchers around the world to accelerate understanding of the COVID-19 virus and the development of treatments and vaccines. NASA's High-End Computing Capability will provide resources to researchers selected by a panel of experts, who will quickly assess potential impact, computational feasibility, overall resource requirements, and timeline.

03.20.20 - NCCS-Hosted Models Probe Fires on Two Continents: As massive fires wreaked havoc in the western United States and Australia over recent months, NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS)-supported computer models combined with observations were probing the dynamics and far-flung effects of these fires.

03.23.20 - New 3D View of Methane Tracks Sources and Movement around the Globe: NASA’s new 3-dimensional portrait of methane concentrations shows the world’s second largest contributor to greenhouse warming, the diversity of sources on the ground, and the behavior of the gas as it moves through the atmosphere. Computations ran at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

03.06.20 - Earth Day Countdown T-47: Climate Modeling Then and Now: Computer models of climate have changed dramatically since the first Earth Day. In 1970, a NASA computer model forecast temperature over boxes 250 miles wide. Now, NASA computer models can forecast temperature across boxes 7.5 miles wide.

02.21.20 - NASA Simulations Explore Habitability of Nearest Exoplanet: Empowered by the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Discover supercomputer, a team of NASA scientists ran the first climate simulations incorporating a dynamic ocean of the exoplanet nearest to Earth—Proxima Centauri b.

02.14.20 - Accelerating Science with AI and Machine Learning: Using the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Advanced Data Analytics Platform (ADAPT), NASA researchers are accelerating scientific research with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

02.10.20 – How Quiet Can You Go?: Full-scale simulations of a Boeing 777 run on the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility’s Pleiades supercomputer by scientist Mehdi Khorrami, NASA Langley Research Center, aim to reduce aircraft landing noise and improve the quality of life for communities near major airports.

02.05.20 - Pluto's Icy Nitrogen Heart Makes its Atmosphere Spin Backwards: A weather forecast simulation run at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division shows that cyclical changes in nitrogen ice on Pluto's surface drive winds that blow in the opposite direction to the frigid world’s spin.

01.24.20 - How Earth Climate Models Help Scientists Picture Life on Unimaginable Worlds: NASA’s Discover supercomputer is tasked with running sophisticated climate models to predict Earth’s future climate but is also sussing out something much farther away: whether any of the more than 4,000 curiously weird planets beyond our solar system discovered in the past two decades could support life.

01.23.20 - Simulations Reveal Galaxy Clusters Details: University astrophysicists probed galaxy clusters using NASA's Pleiades and the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters, Comet, and Stampede2 supercomputers.

01.16.20 - Global Transport of Smoke from Australian Bushfires: The transport of the Australian bushfire smoke plumes around the globe has accelerated through deep vertical transport into the upper troposphere and even the lowermost stratosphere, as shown by the GEOS global data assimilation and forecast system running at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

01.10.20 – Researchers Model Superflare from Sun-Like Star at NCCS: NASA and university researchers modeled a gigantic superflare and coronal mass ejection from Kappa Ceti—a Sun-like star 29 light-years away from Earth—employing NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) high-performance computing resources.

01.06.20 – Snow Depth Variability in the Northern Hemisphere Mountains Observed From Space: An evaluation with in situ measurements from ~4,000 sites and NASA MERRA-2 reanalysis data demonstrates that Sentinel-1 snow depth retrievals capture the spatial variability between and within mountain ranges, as well as their interannual differences. The research leveraged NCCS computing resources.

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