CSC is an information-technology services provider company. It already has been working with NASA over the past four decades. CSC will provide support to NASA’s supercomputer center called NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division, which has the responsibility in providing NASA with computational needs for its activities related to missions and research.

The CSC facility at Lanham, Maryland, will provide these services to the NAS Division, which is based at the Ames Research Center, Moffitt Field, California. The company will also provide similar services to the NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Future options include providing additional supercomputer services to other NASA facilities.

The NAS website specifically says of its overall mission to NASA: “The NAS Division is dedicated to providing scientists and engineers with the supercomputing resources and simulation tools needed to carry out critical NASA missions and make new scientific discoveries for the benefit of humankind.”

The cost-plus-award contact, which was announced on Monday, July 23, 2007, stipulates the period of agreement to be two years, with eight one-year optional years added upon completion of satisfactory work.

Recently, on Wednesday, June 6, 2007, NASA also awarded the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) with a contract to provide an IBM System p575+ supercomputer system for the purpose of evaluating future supercomputing technologies, which includes such activities as global climate research, astrophysics/cosmological studies, and space vehicle design. The new supercomputer system will be used in unison with NASA’s Columbia system, which is one of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Additional information on the IBM contact and the Columbia system is found at: http://www.nas.nasa.gov/News/Releases/2007/06_06_07_IBM.html.

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NASA  Research  Science  Services  Supercomputing  William Atkins