NAS - Supercomputing master tool for aeronautics

Features, performance objectives and applications planned for the NASA National Aerodynamics Simulator (NAS) are outlined. NAS was conceived in the 1970s as a means to performing numerical aerodynamic simulations beyond the scope of wind tunnel testing for high-speed flight. Present supercomputers cannot deal with problems exhibiting strongly coupled viscous effects, which are being increasingly more accurately represented by approximations to the full Navier-Stokes equations. Located at the NASA-Ames Center, the NAS will by 1990 comprise a distributed computer network capable of a 4 Gflop computing rate and have a memory capacity of 1 billion 64-bit words. Remote access to the system through UNIX-based microcomputers will be available through land lines and satellite links. New supercomputers will be tested on the system without disturbing ongoing work. The core machine will be a Cray-2 with a 2 Gflop rate.