2008 marks the 25th anniversary of NAS.

Some highlights spanning our 25-year history:

• First to put UNIX on supercomputers.
  
  
• First to implement TCP/IP networking in a supercomputing environment.
  
  
• First to link supercomputers and workstations together to distribute computation and visualization (what is now known as client/server).
  
  
• Developed Aeronet, the first high-speed wide-area network (WAN) connecting supercomputing resources to remote customer sites.
  
  
• Developed first batch queuing system for supercomputers, NQS, which became an industry standard.
  
  
• Developed the first UNIX-based hierarchical mass storage system (MSS/NAStore).
  
  
• Developed the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB), which became the industry standard for objective evaluation of parallel computing architectures. - The NPB are still widely used today.
  
  
• Developed PBS, the first batch queuing software for parallel and distributed systems, which has been transferred to the commercial sector.
  
  
• Developed and contributed to the development of numerous visualization software applications that have become industry standards, including Plot3D and FAST (Flow Analysis Software Toolkit).
  
  
• First to develop and distribute software for automatic detection and visualization of 3D flow field topology, such as vortex cores, separation lines, attachment lines (FAST topology module).
  
  
• Co-created the NASA Metacenter, the first successful attempt to dynamically distribute real-user production workloads across Agency supercomputing resources at geographically distant locations.
  
  
• Became an early proponent of grid technologies, and developed NASA's first distributed, heterogeneous computing infrastructure, the Information Power Grid.
  
  
• First to develop and apply parallel multi-view tiled-display visualization systems (hyperwall).
  
  
• Co-developed, with industry partner SGI, the world's first IRIX single-system image 256-, 512- and 1,024-processor supercomputers.
  
  
• Co-developed, with industry partner, SGI, the world's first Linux-based, single-system image 512-processor supercomputer.
  
  
• Co-developed, with industry partners SGI and Intel, one of the world's largest and fastest supercomputers, Columbia, a 10,240-processor supercluster running the Linux operating system.
  
  
• Co-developed, with industry partner SGI, the first 2,048-processor shared memory environment, as part of the Columbia supercomputer.
  
  
• First to demonstrate multi-stream concurrent visualization with negligible overhead to on-going supercomputer computations, enabling visualization of every simulation time-step in dozens of views, including remote distribution of visualization streams in real time.
  
  
• Co-developed, with industry partner SGI, the first 2,048-processor single-system image (SSI) supercomputer, an Altix 4700 running the Linux operating system.