AS7847 NASA-HPCC-ESS

NASA-HPCC-ESS belongs to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The handle names the High Performance Computing and Communications programme's Earth and Space Sciences project, the Goddard effort that ran NASA's massively-parallel supercomputing testbeds for Earth- and space-science grand-challenge codes.

What it's used for

• A single legacy /16, 169.154.0.0/16, registered to NASA in December 1994 under the network name GSFC-ATM — Goddard's ATM-era research network.
• Government research connectivity at Goddard rather than any kind of public service. There is no reverse DNS visible on the space and no subscriber or hosting addressing of any kind.

Notable

• This is US federal government address space held by a civilian science agency. Traffic from it is a Goddard system or a research host, not a consumer or a commercial server.
• The registration name preserves the technology of the day: GSFC-ATM refers to Asynchronous Transfer Mode, the high-speed networking Goddard used to feed its supercomputing testbeds in the mid-1990s.

Interesting

• The ESS project was where NASA pushed scalable computing to its limits, including the Cray T3E installed at Goddard, and the same Goddard group under Jim Fischer is where the Beowulf commodity-cluster project was born. AS7847's address space is a direct artefact of that era of NASA supercomputing.