Skip to main content
NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division World-class modeling, simulation, and supercomputing in support of the NASA mission

Recently Expanded, NASA’s First Modular Supercomputer Ranks 15th in the U.S. on TOP500 List

Electra, NASA’s first module-based supercomputer, ranks 15th in the U.S. and 33rd worldwide on the November 2017 TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, as announced November 13 at SC17 in Denver.

exterior photo of the second module of NASA's Electra supercomputer'
Electra’s second module, installed approximately one year after the first, was designed with new technologies that support more, higher-density compute systems. When fully populated with Intel Skylake nodes, this module will allow Electra to expand to over 8 petaflops. Derek Shaw, NASA/Ames

Initially deployed in 2016 as a single module in the Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF) at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility, Ames Research Center, Electra was expanded with a second MSF module that became operational in late October 2017. The expansion adds four HPE E-cells containing 1,152 nodes with dual 20-core Intel Xeon Gold 6148 (Skylake) processors to Electra’s original configuration of 1,152 nodes with dual Xeon E5-2680v4 (Broadwell) processors, increasing the system’s theoretical peak performance from 1.23 to 4.79 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second).

The MSF uses a combination of outdoor air and adiabatic technology to remove the heat generated by Electra, and consumes less than 10% of the energy used in traditional supercomputing facilities. With the first module, the system achieved a 1.03 power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating—the ratio of energy used by the computing equipment to energy used to power the entire data center—falling well below the computing industry standard of 1.7 PUE.

In its first year, the MSF used 95% less water than Electra would require if it were installed in a traditional data center facility. The second module employs even newer cooling technologies and can hold twice the number of nodes as the first, and has maintained the excellent PUE measurement of the first module in its first few weeks of operation.

Building on the success of Electra, the NAS Division is moving ahead with plans for an expanded modular environment at Ames with up to eight times the capability of the current Electra configuration. As usage on NASA’s largest supercomputer, Pleiades, has increased more than 20% in the last two years alone, these plans for expansion will help the agency keep up with the demands for supercomputing time to support NASA-sponsored engineers and researchers as they continue to study Earth systems, seek to invent the next breakthrough in aerospace technology, discover new planets, and explore the origin of the universe.