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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @01:44PM
I am a FORTRAN expert, or was 20 years ago, and I saw this and thought that it would be fun to dig into the code and see if I could identify any low hanging fruit. However, this is Fortran (not FORTRAN), which I have not ever attempted to code in, so maybe not as fun, but I thought I'd take a peek at it anyway. Then, it turns out to be a big PITA to just access to the code, so now I'm not so interested anymore.