NASA Flips for Petaflops

By Nancy Atkinson - May 8, 2008 at 4:11 PM UTC | uncategorized
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NASA is collaborating with Intell and SGI to create one of the world's fastest supercomputers whose power will be measured in petaflops. By 2009 the US space agency wants to develop a computational system that will be able to do 1,000 trillion calculations per second. And by 2012 it hopes to have boosted the power of this machine to 10 petaflops, to help with modelling and simulation. NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Division is calling the new project Pleiades, and it will be installed at the Ames Research Center in California, the site of its current supercomputer, Columbia, pictured here. The new computer would put NASA on the list of the top five fastest number crunchers in the world.

"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. "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."

NASA uses its current supercomputer to examine the performance of hypersonic aircraft, simulate lander deployments and model fabrics for future spacesuits.

"This additional computational performance is necessary to help us achieve breakthrough scientific discoveries," said Pete Worden, Director at Ames.

Currently, the most powerful supercomputer on Earth is BlueGene/L which has a top speed of 478.2 teraflops.

Columbia was turned on in 2004 and has a theoretical peak of 88.88 teraflops. This makes it the 20th most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to the Top 500 Project which compiles a list of the relative performance of these machines.

Petaflop computers are expected to debut in the next release of the Top 500 list which is due in June.

Quasi-supercomputing, where multiple computers are used using the

BOINC

platform has already achieved petaflop status. Folding@home, reported nearly 1.3 Petaflops of processing power in late 2007.

The largest BOINC project, SETI@home, reported processing power of over 450 teraflops through almost 350,000 active computers.

Original News Sources:

BBC,

NASA

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com