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NASA’s Electra Supercomputer Rises to 12th Place in the U.S. on the TOP500 List

Artist rendering of Electra cutaway
Housed in the Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF) a short distance the primary NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility, Electra was expanded in 2018, bringing the system to over 8 petaflops peak performance. The MSF's cooling systems take advantage of the San Francisco Bay Area’s mild climate, significantly reducing the electricity and water needed to remove heat from the systems. Marco Librero, NASA/Ames

NASA’s first modular supercomputer, Electra is now the 12th most powerful computer in the United States and ranks 33rd worldwide on the November 2018 TOP500 list, announced November 12 at SC18 in Dallas. The system reached 9th place in the U.S. and 24th in the world on the latest High Performance Computing Gradient (HPCG) benchmark list, also announced at SC18.

Housed in two containers that comprise the Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF) at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Electra was expanded over the past year to provide researchers with more computing power to support the agency’s scientific and engineering projects. Systems engineers at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility added 1,152 Intel Xeon Gold 6148 (Skylake) nodes in 2018, doubling the number of Electra’s Skylake nodes to 2,304 and fully populating the system’s second module. Combined with the first module’s 1,152 Xeon E5-2680v4 (Broadwell) nodes, the expansion brings Electra’s theoretical peak performance to 8.32 petaflops.

The innovative module-based approach to house, power, and cool Electra saved approximately 2 million kilowatt-hours of power and over 3 million gallons of water in Fiscal Year 2018, when compared to its usage if the system had been installed in the primary NAS facility. Electra’s power usage effectiveness (PUE)—the ratio of energy used to power the entire facility to energy used by the computers—exceeded expectations and surpassed industry standards, with a rating of 1.025 PUE for Module 1 and 1.036 PUE for Module 2.

By expanding the compute power available to NASA scientists and engineers, Electra has already made a significant impact on the agency’s missions. Researchers at the NAS facility using the supercomputer include NASA aerospace engineers Patricia Ventura Diaz, who is helping usher in an era of Urban Air Mobility with high-fidelity simulations of autonomous rotary-wing concept vehicles; Jordan Angel, who researches the feasibility of electric aircraft designs and quiet supersonic technology; andMichael Aftosmis, who helps assess the risk posed by asteroids entering Earth’s atmosphere by running thousands of potential impact scenarios on Electra.

Electra and the MSF are operated by NASA’s High-End Computing Capability (HECC) Project, which also operates Pleiades, the agency’s most powerful supercomputer. Pleiades is ranked 11th in the U.S. on the November 2018 TOP500 list, and 7th in the U.S. on the latest HPCG list.

Dozens of science and engineering projects supported by Electra, Pleiades, and other HECC resources are being presented in the NASA booth at SC18, the International Supercomputing Conference, November 12-15 in Dallas, Texas. To learn more, see the NASA@SC18 website.