All Pleiades nodes have been turned off.

Athena, NASA's new 20.13 petaflop AMD CPU-based system, is currently in beta testing. For more information, see this HECC news item.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What systems/services are being affected by this decommission?
A: The compute nodes that make up the Pleiades supercomputer are going away, which includes all Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell nodes at NAS, in addition to the Pleiades-based Broadwell nodes. The Electra-based Broadwell nodes will remain.

Q: Are the Pleiades Front Ends (PFEs) going away?
A: No, the PFEs will remain as the front ends of Aitken (Cascade Lake and Rome nodes), Electra, and Endeavour. You may notice some phrasing and terminology changes in how we reference the PFEs in the documentation to try to disassociate them from the Pleiades compute system.

Q: Are the /nobackup filesystems being impacted?
A: No, the /nobackup filesystems and user data stored on them are not being affected.

Q: Will there be chargebacks related to my FY26 allocation?
A: No, there are no plans to implement SBU chargebacks for FY26 at this time.

Q: What will the SBU rates for the Athena system be?
A: The SBU rate for Athena's Turin nodes will be 12.19 once the system is released for production use. See Preparing to Run on Athena Turin Nodes for details about how to run on this node type.

Q: Can I use my Pleiades allocation on Athena?
A: Yes, your HECC CPU allocations can be used on any of the CPU-based compute nodes at NAS, including Athena.

This news item was originally published on November 25, 2025 and was updated on December 22, 2025, January 5, 2026, and January 7, 2026.