Pleiades Supercomputer Gets a Little More Oomph
NASA's flagship Pleiades supercomputer has just gotten a boost to help keep pace with the intensive number-crunching requirements of scientists and engineers working on some of the agency's most challenging missions.
Pleiades, located at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., is critical for the modeling, simulation, and analysis of a diverse set of agency projects in aeronautics research, Earth and space sciences, and the design and operation of future space exploration vehicles.
Handling Growth in Computational Demand
An expansion completed earlier this month has increased Pleiades' sustained performance rate by 14 percent, to 1.24 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second). To put this enormous number into perspective, if everyone in the world did one calculation per second for eight hours a day, it would take about 370 days to complete what this supercomputer can calculate in one minute.
"As we move toward NASA’s next phase in advanced computing, Pleiades must be able to handle the increasing requirements of more than 1,200 users across the country who rely on the system to perform their large, complex calculations," said Rupak Biswas, chief of the NAS Division at Ames.
"Right now, for example, the system is being used to improve our understanding of how solar flares and other space weather events can affect critical technologies on Earth. Pleiades also plays a key role in producing high-fidelity simulations used for possible vehicle designs such as NASA's upcoming Space Launch System," said Biswas. Space Launch System's first developmental flight is scheduled for late 2017.
Supporting Discovery and Innovation
Since Pleiades' installation in 2008, the NAS Division has performed eight major upgrades to the system. The latest expansion adds 24 of the newest generation of SGI® ICE X systems containing Intel® Xeon® E5 Family (Sandy Bridge) processors. More than 65 miles of cabling—the largest InfiniBand® network in the world— interconnects Pleiades nodes with data storage systems and the hyperwall-2 visualization system.
Recently, scientists have counted on Pleiades for generating the "Bolshoi" cosmological simulation—the largest simulation of its kind to date—to help explain how galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe have evolved over billions of years. The system has also proven essential for processing massive amounts of star data gathered from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, leading to the discovery of new Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way galaxy. The upgraded capability of Pleiades will enable NASA scientists to solve challenging problems like these more quickly, using even larger datasets.
"Pleiades has been a resounding success, and an example of the efficient sharing of one of the most powerful compute clouds across a wide domain of research projects such as climate simulation, global ocean current modeling, and hurricane tracking. These are research topics that can affect millions of lives every day, and they are growing in complexity at an enormous rate," said SGI CEO Jorge Titinger. "NASA and SGI are long-time partners, pushing the boundaries of technology development, scientific discovery, and finding answers together."
For more than 25 years, the NAS Division has partnered with Silicon Valley corporations to develop high-performance computing resources. SGI and Intel have played a role in the evolution of the Pleiades supercomputer as well as its predecessor, the Columbia supercomputer.
"Leading customers such as NASA require that Intel and SGI work closely together to make available the performance, density, and scale needed to work on these incredibly complex computational challenges," said Rajeeb Hazra, vice president of Intel's Architecture Group and General Manager of the company's Technical Computing organization. "The new Intel Xeon processor E5 Family has been designed to provide exceptional performance and will allow Pleiades to increase its available capability by over 40 percent."
