The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the University of California, Berkeley are working together to host supercomputing resources.
The agency said Friday it has entered into an agreement with the research university to host its supercomputer and storage systems at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. In particular, they will be hosted at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility, or NAS, the agency’s foremost supercomputing center.
The Reimbursable Space Act Agreement is aimed at developing novel computing algorithms and software for various areas in science and technology. It will also facilitate an exchange of knowledge and resources between the two parties.
Rupak Biswas, director of exploration technology, said the move to support UC Berkeley’s supercomputing operations “opens up possibilities for gaining new knowledge in aeronautical and space sciences, materials sciences and information science.”
Under the three-year pact, researchers from the land-grant university will gain vital knowledge about optimizing modern computing codes from NASA. On the other hand, the agency will learn about UC Berkeley’s best practices in operating and maintaining computing systems.
A NASA data center will house the latest addition to the university’s “Savio” supercomputer. It will have 192 dual Intel Ice Lake Xeon processor nodes, 32 NVIDIA graphics processor unit accelerated nodes and 1.3 petabytes of flash storage.
The recent development is in line with UC Berkeley’s collaboration with SKS Partners in October 2023. The San Francisco-based real estate developers will construct the Berkeley Space Center, a 36-acre innovation center, at the NASA Research Park.
