High-End Computing Capability
Computing power to answer NASA's complex science and engineering questions
HECC Facts & Highlights
Some interesting tidbits related to the HECC Project's high-end computing environment.
Quick Facts
- CPU hours delivered since August 2008 (approximate):
- Today's Pleiades supercomputer delivers about 17.5 million times the power of the first Cray X-MP supercomputer at the NAS facility in 1984.
- Current HECC systems take just 12.3% of the electrical power of our systems 5 years ago to produce the same computations (based on the Westmere nodes producing 11.72 GFlop/s per core, with a 768-core rack consuming 27 kva; and Columbia producing 6.398 GFlop/s per core, with a 512-core system consuming 80 kva).
- HECC supports 1,000 users from around the U.S., with over 500 projects running at any one time.
- Largest InfiniBand network in the world, with over 50 miles (80.4 km) of cable interconnecting the supercomputing systems and storage devices—the same distance as the mesopause, the upper boundary of Earth's mesosphere.
- Number of four-drawer filing cabinets full of text that would fit on the Lou mass storage system: 660 million.
Real-World Impacts
Here are a few examples of the real-world science accomplishments enabled by our supercomputing resources over the years.
- Space Shuttle Safety: Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) experts at Johnson Space Center and at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames helped develop OVERFLOW, the primary CFD code used to predict Space Shuttle debris paths and damage. Modeling the many possible debris trajectories, and comparing mock conditions to the shuttle thermal protection system's real-world ability to withstand impact, requires hundreds of high-fidelity, unsteady simulations that must be run in a short time on HECC supercomputers.
- Hurricane Tracking & Prediction: Simulations of Cyclone Nargis (2008), produced using Pleiades and cutting-edge visualization techniques, were the first to show the genesis of this devastating tropical storm five days in advance. Research scientists supporting NASA's Earth Science Technology Office needed hundreds of thousands of processors for each simulation to improve the understanding of tropical storm genesis and intensification, and to extend prediction-time for tropical storms to help save lives and property.
- Ocean & Sea Ice State: Scientists at NASA and MIT on the Estimating the Climate and Circulation of the Ocean 2 (ECCO2) project are using advanced computation to reconstruct the day-to-day state of the Earth's ocean and sea-ice system. In addition to helping develop core understanding of how the ocean and sea-ice system works, this information is being used to provide scientific input for real-world issues including: monitoring the ocean atmosphere exchange of carbon dioxide; forecasting the likely impact of pollutant plumes, such as the Deep Water horizon; and improving estimates of Antarctic glacial melting.
- Heart Assist Device: Simulations of blood flows within the human circulatory system were crucial to development of the NASA-DeBakey Ventricular Assist Device (VAD). Using knowledge gained from shuttle technology, CFD experts made improvements to the VAD design to increase blood flow circulation and reduce clotting—improving the lives of hundreds of heart failure patients around the world.
User Quick Links
Can't find what you're looking for? NAS Control Room staff are available 24x7x365: (800) 331-8737, (650) 604-4444, support@nas.nasa.gov
