Learn how NASA is embracing Open Source in the first article in a LinuxLinks series spotlighting large institutions in the USA powered by Linux.

 

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research. NASA’s budget in 2020 is over $22 billion. To put that figure into context, that’s equivalent to the annual GDP of Zambia, Papua New Guinea, or Laos.

How is NASA embracing Linux and open source?

NASA runs a set of supercomputers with the names Pleiades, Electra, Aitken, Merope, and Endeavour at the Ames Research Center. Pleides is one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, currently ranked the 39th most powerful in the world, sporting an eye-watering 241,108 cores and 211,968 GB of memory. Pleiades and the other supercomputers run on a custom version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.