NASA Supercomputer Ranks Among World's Fastest

NASA's newest supercomputer at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., has garnered the number three spot on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful computers. The announcement was made Nov. 17, 2008 at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC08) in Austin, Texas.

The Pleiades supercomputer is an SGI Altix ICE system with 12,800 Intel Xeon quad-core processors (51,200 cores, 100 racks) running at 487 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops) on the LINPACK benchmark, the industry standard for measuring a system's floating point computing power.

One of the most powerful general-purpose supercomputers ever built, Pleiades also features the world's largest InfiniBand interconnect network.

The LINPACK run also measured electrical power consumption-an increasingly important consideration in high-end computing. Using a total of 2.09 megawatts, or 233 megaflops per watt, Pleiades is among the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world.

"Pleiades represents a significant engineering achievement in several ways," said William Thigpen, Pleiades project manager at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames.


In addition to its power and InfiniBand record, "Pleiades can run NASA codes with minimal modifications, and is compatible with standard desktop engineering workstations so our users can migrate codes easily from their desktops. Users from all key mission areas will have an enormous resource to meet their critical milestones," Thigpen added.

Among the scientific and engineering projects accepted for computer time on Pleiades:

- Extensive simulations of large computational problems for future space vehicle design;

- Development of increasingly detailed models of large-scale dark matter halos and galaxy evolution;

- Running coupled atmosphere-ocean models to assess decadal climate prediction skill for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Over a record-making few weeks, NASA has again deployed one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world," said Eng Lim Goh, chief technology officer at SGI.

"In the race to achieve superior computational power, NASA's knowledge of rapid yet productive deployment is a rare advantage. We are proud to be part of NASA's ongoing journey to show the world what is possible."

"We look forward to seeing the science breakthroughs enabled by Pleiades," said Stephen Wheat, senior director for high performance computing at Intel Corp. "It's rewarding to see that the performance features of the Intel Xeon quad-core processors meet the growing computational challenges of the nation's space program."

The InfiniBand fabric interconnecting Pleiades' 6,400 nodes requires more than 20 miles of double data rate cabling. InfiniBand is also used as the primary local-area network backbone that interconnects computing, storage, and visualization systems, and to facilitate cross-system data file access.

This enables scientific visualization and data analysis to execute concurrently as computer jobs run, producing ultra-high-fidelity results for the enormous datasets used in NASA mission projects.

Pleiades was acquired to augment the space agency's Columbia supercomputer (ranked No. 2 on the Top500 list in November 2004) in supporting NASA's four key mission areas: aeronautics research, exploration systems, science, and space operations.

source : http://www.spacedaily.com/

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NASA, Intel And SGI Team Up To Soup Up The Supercomputer

NASA, Intel Corp., and SGI today announced the signing of an agreement establishing intentions to collaborate on significantly increasing the space agency's supercomputer performance and capacity.

Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA will work closely with Intel and SGI to increase computational capabilities for modeling and simulation at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

"Achieving such a monumental increase in performance will help fulfill NASA's increasing need for additional computing capacity and will enable us to provide the computational performance and capacity needed for future missions," said Ames Director S. Pete Worden. "This additional computational performance is necessary to help us achieve breakthrough scientific discoveries."

NASA Ames, Intel and SGI will work together on a project called Pleiades to develop a computational system with a capacity of one Petaflops peak performance (1,000 trillion operations per second) by 2009 and a system with a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10,000 trillion operations per second) by 2012.


"Throughout its history, NASA has sought to explore the most compelling questions about mankind, Earth, and the worlds that await our discovery," said Robert "Bo" Ewald, chief executive officer of SGI.

"SGI is proud to be part of this effort. These groundbreaking new systems powered by SGI and fueled by the latest multi-core Intel processors, offer a platform for new discoveries that will help us all achieve the most promising future for the human race. This effort is important to everyone on this planet."

This collaboration builds on the 2004 deployment of Columbia, which generated a tenfold increase in supercomputing capacity for the agency. Meeting NASA's future mission challenges will require additional computational resources to handle increasingly higher fidelity modeling and simulation. In 2009, NASA expects to increase that computing capability 16 times with the Pleiades project, and by an additional tenfold in 2012.

"Intel, working with SGI, is proud to play an important role in helping NASA expand the pursuit of scientific discovery," said Diane M. Bryant, vice president of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group and general manager or Server Platforms Group, Intel Digital Enterprise Group.

"Systems such as Pleiades challenge the imagination, and guide our exploration of Earth, space, and beyond. As we approach performance that was once thought impossible to achieve, our eyes are opened even wider to the vast possibilities enabled by supercomputing."

Source : http://www.spacedaily.com/

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