Customer story
NASA’s Flight Sciences Lab runs its most demanding missions on RLC Pro
The Flight Sciences Lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center runs 28,000 cores of mission-critical HPC on Rocky Linux and RLC Pro, with a support relationship the team describes as an on-demand extension of their own engineering team.
28,000+
Cores in production
Across roughly 700 servers in two clusters
10+ PB
Parallel storage
Mounted directly by engineering workstations
1,000+
Registered users
300 to 400 people on the lab any given day
FIPS 140
Certified across the fleet
The government cryptography standard the lab must run
The environment, the missions, and why RLC Pro
How 28,000 cores of human spaceflight analysis run on Rocky Linux and RLC Pro.
- Who
- The Flight Sciences Lab (FSL), NASA’s Johnson Space Center HPC facility
- What they run
- Two clusters, roughly 28,000 cores across 700 servers, 10+ petabytes of parallel storage, 100+ engineering workstations, 1,000+ registered users
- What’s on it
- Rocky Linux and RLC Pro, running FIPS 140-certified, across every node type from AMD and Intel systems to GPU-equipped workstations
- What it supports
- Analysis for every NASA human spaceflight mission, including Artemis II reentry and heat shield modeling, ISS docking and berthing, Human Landing System plume analysis, and real-time support to Mission Control during active flights
- Why RLC Pro
- A support relationship the FSL team describes as an on-demand extension of their own engineering team, with root-cause fixes instead of workarounds
“When you’re deciding on support, it’s worth the money. Day to day, it feels like having another team member on demand.”
The story in brief
The FSL’s move off CentOS 7 landed on Rocky Linux 8 right at the wire, paired with a move to fully automated deployment, on infrastructure supporting live human spaceflight analysis with zero margin for an OS that can’t be trusted. The move also brought FIPS 140 certification and cut patching timelines from a quarterly cycle to, in some cases, inside a week.
“CIQ digs into true root cause, not just the fastest way out of the ditch. They come back with documentation running eight or nine pages covering every configuration and approach they tried.”
Why this matters beyond one lab
The same things that hold up under a launch schedule hold for any environment where an OS problem becomes everyone else’s problem.
Root cause fixes, not workarounds.
When a performance gap or a rendering bug can’t be reproduced on standard hardware, CIQ has shipped its own engineers, and shipped hardware across the world, to reproduce and solve it.
Migration support that doesn’t stall the mission.
A major-version OS migration on infrastructure with zero tolerance for surprises still landed on schedule, with automation that made the next migration easier, not harder.
Compliance built in, not bolted on.
FIPS 140 certification came with the move to RLC Pro, without a separate compliance project.
Evaluate RLC Pro for your environment
RLC Pro for regulated and high-availability production environments
Long-Term Support, FIPS 140-3 validated packages, CVE remediation, supply chain security, and support options built for regulated, high-availability production.
RLC Pro Hardened: compliance and OS-level hardening
LKRG, the FIPS 140-3 delivery model, DISA STIG and CIS compliance, and the full OS-level hardening feature set from the CIQ Linux Security team.
Get the case study
See the full story: how NASA’s Flight Sciences Lab runs 28,000 cores of mission-critical HPC on Rocky Linux and RLC Pro, and what the support relationship actually looks like when a mission is on the line.