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NASA High-End Computing Capabilities

Learn about the supercomputers and other services provided by NASA’s High-End Computing facilities.

NASA’s High-End Computing (HEC) facilities and services support scientists and engineers across all NASA Mission Directorates, as well as university and industry partners. These resources are maintained by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division, which operates the agency’s premier supercomputing facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. 

NAS provides more than 1,500 NASA-associated HEC users with advanced computing systems, storage, and innovative tools and technologies for solving today’s science and engineering problems. 

Major Technical Areas

The Athena supercomputer at NASA Ames.

Supercomputing Systems

Providing computational power, storage, and a user-friendly environment to run jobs, with 24/7/365 help desk assistance.

Contours of the magnetic field strength of Earth’s magnetosphere, showing magnetic field lines. This image is taken from a simulation run using the ANGIE3D space simulation code, which was modified and optimized by the HECC Application Performance and Productivity team.

Application Optimization

Facilitating advances in science and engineering for NASA programs and projects by helping users improve their productivity and code performance on high-end computing applications.

Satellite Relay Network CSP

End-to-End Networking

Providing efficient, reliable high-speed networking to meet the massive modeling, simulation data distribution, and access requirements of geographically dispersed users.

The Hyperwall at NASA Ames.

Visualization & Data Analysis

Creating leading-edge software tools to help engineers and scientists gain insight into large, complex datasets, incorporating advanced visualization technologies and displays such as the in-house developed hyperwall visualization system.

Computing Resources

The Athena supercomputer at NASA Ames.

Athena

Released to users early 2026, Athena is currently NASA’s most powerful supercomputer. It has a peak performance of 20.13 petaflops, or 20 quadrillion calculations every second, and sits at the Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF) at Ames.

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The Aitken supercomputer at NASA Ames.

Aitken

Aitken was the first system to be housed at the MSF at Ames. The MSF site, built to take advantage of Silicon Valley's mild climate, saves thousands of gallons of water daily and reduces cooling and electrical power costs.

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The Cabeus supercomputer at NASA Ames.

Cabeus

Cabeus is a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based system, built to support artificial intelligence, visualization, and other analytics applications that can particularly benefit from accelerated processing. It is housed at NASA Ames.

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The Electra supercomputer at NASA Ames.

Electra

The Electra supercomputer, housed in a pair of environmentally friendly modules near the main NAS building at Ames, is NASA’s first prototype modular supercomputing system.

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The Endeavour supercomputer at NASA Ames.

Endeavour

The Endeavour supercomputer at Ames is a shared-memory system supporting applications that need access to large cache-coherent, global shared-memory capabilities in a single system image.

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The Network File System (NFS) Lustre tape storage filesystems at NASA Ames.

Data Storage

The 1,400-petabyte storage system at Ames allows HEC science and engineering users to archive and retrieve important results quickly, reliably, and securely.

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Photo of the fourth-generation hyperwall cluster installed at the NAS facility. The 128-screen hyperwall visualization system can display unique images in selected "cells", as seen here, or can display a single image across all screens.

Visualization

The hyperwall visualization system at Ames—one of the largest and most powerful in the world—provides a supercomputer-scale environment that allows users to view and explore their computational results in unprecedented detail and speed.

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High-End Computing for Researchers

NASA-funded researchers, engineers, and scientists can use HEC computing resources for their projects. This includes access to the computing systems, as well as integrated, customizable services such as visualization, data analysis pipelines, and networking.

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Snapshot of a magnetic loop emerging through the solar surface. Individual magnetic field lines are color-coded by the magnitude of the magnetic field. Convective up flows and down flows advect the magnetic field into these loop-like structures. Small convective motions near the surface shred the field into tiny filaments, while large convective motions deep under the surface produce the overall loop configuration. As the loop emerges through the solar surface, its vertical legs remain and produce the dark sunspot. Patrick Moran, NASA/Ames
Snapshot of a magnetic loop emerging through the solar surface, as simulated by NASA’s High-End Computing facilities.
Patrick Moran, NASA/Ames
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