NEW NASA SUPERCOMPUTER FACILITY SET TO ADVANCE EARTH RESEARCH

FROM:  NASA
WASHINGTON -- NASA soon will open a new chapter of discovery using
enhanced Landsat Earth-observing data in a state-of-the-art,
high-performance computing and data access facility called NASA Earth
Exchange (NEX). This new facility is a virtual laboratory that will
allow scientists to tackle global Earth science challenges with
global high-resolution satellite observations.

After extensive development and testing, NASA is making the NEX
facility available to the research community for further research and
development. With NASA's state-of-the-art supercomputing capacity,
researchers can use NEX to explore and analyze large Earth science
data sets in hours rather than months. Scientists can produce
complex, interdisciplinary studies of world phenomena and share their
findings instantly on the NEX platform.

"Because of the large volume of high-resolution Landsat data,
scientists who wanted to study the planet as a whole prior to NEX
needed to invest tremendous amounts of time and effort to develop
high-end computational methods rather than focus on important
scientific problems," said Tsengdar Lee, high-end computing program
manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "NEX greatly simplifies
researchers' access to and analysis of high-resolution data like
Landsat."

This new facility boasts a large collection of global data sets and
analysis tools from NASA and other agencies, including surface
weather records, topography, soils, land cover and global climate
simulations. Using NEX, scientists now can fit Landsat scenes
together like a giant jigsaw puzzle to create snapshots of global
vegetation patterns containing more than a half-trillion pixels in
less than 10 hours. These global vegetation products, referred to as
the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, complement the more
standard products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite but with 10 times higher
resolution.

"The science community is under increasing pressure not only to study
recent and projected changes in climate that likely impact our global
environment and natural resources, but also to design solutions to
mitigate, or cope, with the likely impacts," said Rama Nemani, a
senior Earth scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett
Field, Calif. "We want to change the research paradigm by bringing
large data holdings and supercomputing capabilities together, so
researchers have everything they need in one place."

Developed by a team at Ames, NEX combines Earth-system modeling,
remote-sensing data from NASA and other agencies, and a scientific
social networking platform to deliver a complete research
environment. Users can explore and analyze large Earth science data
sets, run and share modeling algorithms, collaborate on new or
existing projects and exchange workflows and results within and among
other science communities.

Scientists believe costs and time associated with research development
may be reduced significantly by allowing NEX members to collaborate
instantly in this type of large-scale supercomputing work
environment. For example, NEX may relieve researchers from
redundantly retrieving and integrating data sets and building
modeling analysis codes.

NEX uses Landsat data, which constitute a large collection of images
collected over 40 years by a series of satellite sensors. The
enhanced collection of Landsat data gives scientists the opportunity
to study and understand changes on a planetary scale, looking at
one-quarter acre at a time.

NASA, in cooperation with the Interior Department and its science
agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, launched the first Landsat
satellite in 1972. The resulting 40-year archive of Earth
observations from the Landsat fleet supports the improvement of human
and environmental health, biodiversity, energy and water management,
urban planning, disaster recovery and crop monitoring. The Landsat
program is jointly managed by NASA and the Interior Department.