Groundbreaking on a state-of-the-art supercomputing facility took place on March 14, 1985 in order to construct a building where CFD experts, computer scientists, visualization specialists, and network and storage engineers could be under one roof in a collaborative environment.

Many of these computers include testbed systems built to test new architecture, hardware, or networking set-ups that might be utilized on a larger scale.

[4] Data stored on disk is regularly migrated to the tape archival storage systems at the facility to free up space for other user projects being run on the supercomputers.

[6] With the installation of the Pleiades supercomputer in 2008, the StorageTek systems that NAS had been using for 20 years were unable to meet the needs of the greater number of users and increasing file sizes of each project's datasets.

[35] In 2009, NAS brought in Spectra Logic T950 robotic tape systems which increased the maximum capacity at the facility to 16 petabytes of space available for users to archive their data from the supercomputers.

[36] As of March 2019, the NAS facility increased the total archival storage capacity of the Spectra Logic tape libraries to 1,048 petabytes (or 1 exabyte) with 35% compression.

[34] In 1984, NAS purchased 25 SGI IRIS 1000 graphics terminals, the beginning of their long partnership with the Silicon Valley–based company, which made a significant impact on post-processing and visualization of CFD results run on the supercomputers at the facility.

[40] In 2020, the hyperwall was further upgraded with new hardware: 256 Intel Xeon Platinum 8268 (Cascade Lake) processors and 128 NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 GPUs with a total of 3.1 terabytes of graphics memory.