NASA unveiled the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) this week at the NASA Exploration Center at Moffett Field, Calif. NEX combines supercomputing capacity with global satellite observations and sophisticated models of the Earth system in an online and collaborative environment.
NEX utilizes NASA’s largest and most powerful supercomputer Pleiades with 56,832 processors and a 1.4 petabyte storage capacity along with the hyperwall 2 visualization system (pictured above) with 128 screens and a total surface area of 23-feet by 10-feet.
“NEX uses a new approach for collaboration among scientists and science teams working to model the Earth system and analyze large Earth observation datasets. Using on-line collaboration technologies, NEX will bring together geographically dispersed multi-disciplinary groups of scientists focused on global change research. Scientists will be able to build custom project environments containing the datasets and software components needed to solve complex Earth science problems. These project environments, built using virtualization technology, will be highly portable and reusable and will automatically capture the entire analysis process, including the data and processing steps required to replicate the results in an open and transparent way. For example, results from the processing of the global Landsat data would be available to scientists with the additional expertise required to analyze rates of urbanization, deforestation, or biodiversity impacts. The science teams would have access to not only the data, but also each processing step used to create the global mosaics.”
Read more details about the launch in this NASA release or visit the NASA Earth Exchange website.
