Rachel Hoover/Jill Dunbar
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
650-604-4789
rachel.hoover@nasa.gov / jill.dunbar@nasa.gov
RELEASE: 11-194
NASA'S PLEIADES SUPERCOMPUTER RANKS AMONG WORLD'S FASTEST
WASHINGTON -- NASA's largest supercomputer is seventh on the TOP500
list of the world's most powerful, high-performance computers. The
announcement was made at the 26th International Supercomputing
Conference in Hamburg, Germany.
Pleiades, located at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field,
Calif., supports more than 1,000 active users around the country who
are advancing our knowledge about the Earth, solar system and the
universe. Pleiades is used to meet the computing needs on NASA's most
demanding modeling and simulation projects in aeronautics; Earth and
space science; exploration systems and technologies; and future space
operations.
"We're really excited that Pleiades delivered nearly 83 percent of the
theoretical peak performance," said Rupak Biswas, chief of the NASA
Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames. "This means our
science and engineering users get extremely efficient use of their
computing time on the system. Reaching the sustained petaflop per
second rate is a significant milestone for NASA and its industry
partners."
Since last June, the NAS Division has implemented a series of
expansions to the system's performance capabilities. The team
recently added 14 new SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE 8400 systems so that
Pleiades now contains 23,296 Intel(R) Xeon(R) quad- and hex-core
processors (111,104 cores in 182 racks) that can run at a theoretical
peak of approximately 1.32 quadrillion floating point operations, or
calculations, per second. It achieved an official sustained rate of
1.09 petaflop per second using the LINPACK benchmark, the industry
standard for measuring a system's floating point computing power.
Pleiades runs on three generations of Intel-based processors with
varying memory per core across two generations of InfiniBand(R)
technology. The latest hex-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) 5600 (Westmere) and
earlier quad-core 5570 (Nehalem) processors run at a speed of 2.93
GHz, while the original Pleiades 5400 (Harpertown) quad-core
processors run at 3 GHz.
Since its installation in 2008, scientists have run large-scale jobs
on Pleiades to gain insight into Earth's ocean and climate
variability; reduce harmful emissions from aircraft; and design
future vehicles for planetary and space exploration. The system also
has been critical to supporting debris damage assessment on space
shuttle missions and gave managers data about critical decisions to
perform repairs and clear the orbiter for safe landing.
The NAS facility continues to feature the world's largest
InfiniBand(R) interconnect network with 11,648 nodes and more than 63
miles of cabling -- long enough to reach the "frontier of space" from
the surface of Earth. The double data rate, quad data rate and hybrid
cables interconnect Pleiades' nodes with mass data storage systems
and the hyperwall-2 visualization system. This allows scientists to
concurrently view and analyze their data while their computational
jobs run, often leading to the discovery of previously unknown
details in their ultra-large datasets.
For more information about the Pleiades supercomputer, visit:
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/pleiades.html
For information about the TOP500 list, visit:
For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:
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