NASA'S Pleiades Supercomputer Gets A Little More Oomph

June 19, 2012

J.D. Harrington
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-5241
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

Karen Jenvey / Jill Dunbar
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
650-604-4789 / 650-604-3534
karen.jenvey@nasa.gov / jill.dunbar@nasa.gov

RELEASE: 12-206

NASA'S PLEIADES SUPERCOMPUTER GETS A LITTLE MORE OOMPH

WASHINGTON -- NASA's flagship Pleiades supercomputer just received a
boost to help keep pace with the intensive number-crunching
requirements of scientists and engineers working on some of the
agency's most challenging missions.

Pleiades is critical for the modeling, simulation and analysis of a
diverse set of agency projects in aeronautics research, Earth and
space sciences and the design and operation of future space
exploration vehicles. The supercomputer is located at the NASA
Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center in
Moffett Field, Calif.

An expansion completed earlier this month has increased Pleiades'
sustained performance rate by 14 percent to 1.24 petaflops -- or a
quadrillion calculations per second. To put this enormous number into
perspective, if everyone in the world did one calculation per second
for eight hours a day, it would take about 370 days to complete what
this supercomputer can calculate in 60 seconds.

"As we move toward NASA's next phase in advanced computing, Pleiades
must be able to handle the increasing requirements of more than 1,200
users across the country who rely on the system to perform their
large, complex calculations," said Rupak Biswas, chief of the NAS
division at Ames. "Right now, for example, the system is being used
to improve our understanding of how solar flares and other space
weather events can affect critical technologies on Earth. Pleiades
also plays a key role in producing high-fidelity simulations used for
possible vehicle designs such as NASA's upcoming Space Launch
System."

Since Pleiades' installation in 2008, NAS has performed eight major
upgrades to the system. The latest expansion adds 24 of the newest
generation systems containing advanced processors. More than 65 miles
of cabling interconnects Pleiades nodes with data storage systems and
the hyperwall-2 visualization system.

Recently, scientists have counted on Pleiades for generating the
"Bolshoi" cosmological simulation -- the largest simulation of its
kind to date -- to help explain how galaxies and the large-scale
structure of the universe have evolved over billions of years. The
system also has proven essential for processing massive amounts of
star data gathered from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, leading to the
discovery of new Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way galaxy. The
upgraded capability of Pleiades will enable NASA scientists to solve
challenging problems like these more quickly, using even larger
datasets.

For more information about NASA Advanced Supercomputing, visit:

http://www.nas.nasa.gov

For more information about Pleiades, visit:

http://go.nasa.gov/MJ4NvN


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