University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) has signed an agreement with NASA’s Ames Research Center to host supercomputing resources.

Under the terms of the three-year agreement, Ames and UC Berkeley will jointly support the development of computing algorithms and software across a number of science and technology disciplines.

NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Facility will host the UC Berkeley Savio supercomputer and storage systems and in exchange, NASA will receive best practices in operating and maintaining high-performance computing systems.

The new Savio cluster set to be hosted at the NASA data center will consist of 192 dual Intel Ice Lake Xeon processor nodes, 32 Nvidia GPUs, and 1.3 petabytes of high-performance flash storage. Currently, the Linux-based Savio system has more than 600 nodes and 15,000 processor cores, and can reach around 450 peak teraflops.

“Supporting UC Berkeley in various aspects of supercomputing operations adds an important component to our existing collaboration and opens up exciting possibilities for gaining new knowledge in aeronautical and space sciences, materials sciences, and information science and technologies,” said Rupak Biswas, director, exploration technology at NASA Ames.

In October 2023, UC Berkeley signed a joint venture with developer SKS Partners to build the proposed Berkeley Space Center at NASA Research Park at Ames. When complete, the 36-acre discovery and innovation hub will include educational spaces, labs, offices, student housing, and a new conference center.