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The code in question is called "FUN3D" and was first developed in the 1980s. It's still an important part of the agency's computational fluid dynamics (CFD) capability, and had its most recent release in September 2016.
The agency is now sponsoring a competition with the aim of getting it to go at least 10 times faster. If you can crank it up to ten thousand times faster – without any loss of accuracy – all the better.
Michael Hetle, program executive at NASA's Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program (TACP) explains that "some concepts are just so complex, it's difficult for even the fastest supercomputers to analyse these models in real time. Achieving a speed-up in this software by orders of magnitude hones the edge we need to advance our technology to the next level".
[Update: Original story title was taken directly from the referenced article; updated to remove condescension. --martyb]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:23PM (2 children)
The wars are not pointless. If that were the case there would be more wars.
Control of resources is the name of the game, and the US does it better than any
other country on earth. However NASA has nothing to do with this, and if you were
not an idiot you'd know that.
Anyway, if you don't like it, tough shit, pussyboy. What are you going to actually DO
about it other than whine ? Nothing. Like I said : tough shit, you useless worthless meaningless
pussy.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:47PM
Usually what happens when talented people find themselves living under an oppressive regime, they emigrate somewhere else and do work which benefits another country, and the effect is called Brain Drain. If instead they sit on their hands and refuse to work for the oppressive regime and do nothing, the effect is called Brain Waste.
Fuck Nasa. Don't help America. Brain Waste this shithole to death.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by butthurt on Friday May 05 2017, @09:01PM
> [...] NASA has nothing to do with [war]
Earlier commenters noted that there are export restrictions on this software. A probable reason is that computational fluid dynamics can be used to model nuclear explosions.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a211364.pdf [dtic.mil]
http://impact.ref.ac.uk/CaseStudies/CaseStudy.aspx?Id=17855 [ref.ac.uk]
Whether that's NASA's intention here, I can't say. They do collaborate with the U.S. military, however.