NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center recently opened the NASA Center for Climate Simulation, more than doubling the computing capacity available at the Greenbelt, Md.-based field center.

Completed with the help of nearly $5.5 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money, the NASA Center for Climate Simulation combines supercomputers, visualization tools and data interaction technologies to enhance NASA’s capabilities in weather and climate prediction research, NASA said in a June 28 press release.

The climate simulation center’s recent enhancements include a 15,000-processor “Discover” supercomputer, a 9-square meter multiscreen visualization wall for displaying high-definition movies of simulations, and a new data management system for searching the center’s multipetabyte archive.

The climate simulation center is part of the NASA High-End Computing Program.