Meeting NASA's High-End Computing Goals Through Innovation

Overview

NASA's High End Computing Capability (HECC) project provides scientists and engineers with a world-class computing environment to facilitate advances in their areas across all NASA technical mission organizations. Operated out of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility in California's Silicon Valley, the HECC project's computing environment and full range of support services are focused on enabling discovery across a wide array of disciplines.

Since its inception in 2006, HECC has maintained a computing environment balanced by a strong set of related services. This combination of hardware and services enables exciting innovations across a broad range of scientific and engineering applications.

Project Details

Over the past year, HECC's unique environment was expanded to include new SGI "Sandy Bridge" nodes on the Pleiades supercomputer, resulting in a theoretical peak processing capability exceeding 1.7 petaflops. In addition, HECC tripled the NAS facility's archive storage capacity to over 90 petabytes, expanded the available tool set for diagnosing application performance, and improved the ability of security software to detect and prevent unauthorized login attempts.

Other key innovations include the addition of Fourteen Data Rate InfiniBand (IB) into the world's largest IB fabric (65-plus miles of cable) and increasing the hypercube to a twelfth dimension; maintaining a large shared-memory application development capability with single-system images of up to 4 terabytes of memory; and providing the 245-megapixel hyperwall-2, an internationally acclaimed data analysis and visualization system, with both concurrent and traditional visualization capabilities.

The associated services provide a robust discovery environment focused on the success of NASA's user community. This year has seen improvements across the board, with a strong focus on more useful tools, education outreach through a series of technical webinars, and a website designed to address our users' challenging needs.

Results and Impact

The HECC project has been successful in providing a cost-effective, productive compute environment. The NAS facility supports a wide variety of users with a broad range of computational job requirements. Our achievements range from supporting NASA's current airborne missions, such as Kepler and UAVSAR, the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, to research into the formation of the universe.

The HECC project's role is to provide users across NASA with a cost-effective, reliable, state-of-the-art supercomputing capability. Through strong relationships with the vendor community and a superb technical team, our exciting innovations have been a resounding success this year.