NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division
The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division is located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It has been the major supercomputing and modeling and simulation resource for NASA missions in aerodynamics, space exploration, studies in weather patterns and ocean currents, and space shuttle and aircraft design and development for almost forty years.
NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division
An image of the flowfield around the Space Shuttle Launch Vehicle traveling at Mach 2.46 and at an altitude of 66,000 feet (20,000 m). The surface of the vehicle is colored by the pressure coefficient, and the gray contours represent the density of the surrounding air, as calculated using the OVERFLOW code.
Image: NASA Hyperwall 2
Image: Hyperwall 2
The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laboratory. That agency was dissolved and its assets and personnel transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958. NASA Ames is named in honor of Joseph Sweetman Ames, a physicist and one of the founding members of NACA. At last estimate NASA Ames had over US$3 billion in capital equipment, 2,300 research personnel and a US$860 million annual budget.
Aerial view of Moffett Field and Ames Research Center in 1982
Hangar One, originally a US Navy airship hangar, in Moffett Field, California
IBM 7090 mainframe computer at Ames in 1961. Smith DeFrance, Ames' founding director, is second from the left.
One of the air intakes of the 80 by 120 foot wind tunnel (world's largest), located at NASA Ames Research Center
