The Ames Research Center, at Moffat Field, has over $3.0 billion in capital equipment, 4,000 research personnel and a $775 million annual budget. Ames plays a critical role in virtually all of NASA missions in support of America's space and aeronautics programs.

Its role expands beyond the realm of space and into things that impact our daily lives. Ames used synthetic brainpower to design antennas for use on three small ST5 satellites that were launched into Earth orbit in March 2006. Ames conducts research in air-traffic management, gravitational biology and advanced studies in nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology.

The NASA Ames Research Center is going to get a new supercomputer within 20 months. Currently Ames is fourth on the Top500 list of supercomputers around the world. Ames uses a SGI Altix 1.5 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband making it the fastest Intel-based machine in the world at about 61 teraFLOPS from 10,240 processors. In 2007, after the upgrades, NASA's Ames Research Center would be the 2nd fastest computer running at an estimated 250 teraFLOPS. According to the current Top500 list, this would beat the IBM BlueGene/L's 114 teraFLOPS.

This extra bandwidth will be put to use on NASA's Finite Volume General Circulation Model (fvGCM) which has been cranking out real-time numerical weather prediction (NWP) targeted at improving hurricane track and intensity forecasts.

The improvements will increase the current record of 5 day forecasts up to 14 days advance warning. fvGCM is a global climate and weather prediction model traditionally used for long-term climate simulations and currently can only run at a coarse (approximately100 km) horizontal resolution.

NASA videos of projected Ivan Hurricanes

The fvGCM code has been running on Columbia, producing real-time, high-resolution (approximately 25 km) weather forecasts focused on improving hurricane track and intensity forecasts. The code has been remarkably successful during the active 2004 Atlantic hurricane season, providing landfall forecasts with an accuracy of approximately 100 km up to five days in advance.

These extended forecasts will mean significant economic improvements to many industries. Energy brokers could have a better understanding of power needs. Transportation through shipping or even across land could benefit from improved scheduling. All means of agricultural industries will have insight into advanced weather patterns.