NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division
The NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility (often abbreviated as NAS) is located at the NASA Ames Research Center, located in Moffett Field, California (near Mountain View, California).
It provides computing resources for various NASA projects including: simulating space shuttle launches for future space missions, projecting the impact of human activity on weather patterns, by designing safe, efficient space exploration vehicles and aircraft.
The NAS houses the Columbia (supercomputer), which is a 10,240-processor supercomputer built from 20 SGI Altix systems, each powered by 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors.
The NAS also makes extensive use of the Condor cycle scavenger to distribute large computations across multiple computers.