Supercomputing

Exploring Together: NASA’s Open-Source Science Collaboration Empowered by HPC

Image from visualization of fire intensities on a world map projection showing land masses in very dark grey and water in a lighter blue-grey color
To show fire intensities around the globe, this visualization uses a moving, 5-day window of VIIRS measurements of fire radiative power (FRP). To demonstrate the FRP readings, the heatmap demonstrates a darker red color at lower readings, and it lightens to white at the highest FRP readings. Trent L. Schindler, Doug C. Morton, NASA/Goddard

One of NASA’s latest endeavors involves the adoption of open-source best practices to nurture an environment of collaborative innovation and research. This evolution, whose benefits are collectively voiced by scientific communities, unfolds progressively over time. This shift towards open source accelerates through NASA, driving an increased demand for high-performance computing (HPC) resources, which are vital for open-science work across scientific domains. A pivotal element of HPC is the integration of hybrid computing, which bridges onsite resources with cloud capabilities to optimize data analysis, scientific simulations, and cross-disciplinary exploration. These capabilities are enhanced by HPC’s speed and scalability, two dimensions that open science requires. The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) empowers scientists to engage in open science for collaborative scientific exploration.

Quick Facts

NASA’s supercomputing resources provide scientists with the computational power and flexibility to approach research questions with external research collaborators, further enabling open science at NASA. The aim is to make these resources more equitable by providing access for public users, driving new awareness of the massive datasets being collected and procured by NASA.

Johana Chazaro-Haraksin,
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
  • NASA’s supercomputing resources accelerate the pace of conducting scientific research, visualizations, and simulations. The use of this technology will be required as the agency drives to provide the public platforms of accessibility to utilize datasets delivered by NASA products.
  • NASA scientific research is a collaborative effort across NASA centers, government agencies, and third-party contractors, who benefit from the HPC resources that can be procured to encourage such collaborations.
  • Efforts to implement open-source science practices at NASA will bring greater demand on the hybrid resources available to scientists. It is imperative that the HPC community sees the value in further developing scalable hybrid resources to support these scientific endeavors.
  • The adoption of open-source science is slowly developing across the agency, as the project strives to bring awareness of HPC’s role in making open science an accessible feat by scientists.

Researcher

  • Johana Chazaro-Haraksin, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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