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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:55PM (2 children)
Put the code up on GitHub where it will be forked 1,500 times. No one will contribute any optimizations, but there will be lots of forks. Most of the forks will be resume padding by idiots who want to try to claim to have worked for NASA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:56AM (1 child)
Nah, give it to Micro$oft. They'll DRM it so bad it'll BSOD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:07PM
And have NASA pay for it every time they use it.