NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility
Encyclopedia
NASA Ames Research Center
The Ames Research Center , is one of the United States of America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration 10 major field centers.The centre is located in Moffett Field in California's Silicon Valley, near the high-tech companies, entrepreneurial ventures, universities, and other...
in Moffett Field, California (near Mountain View, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
).
It provides computing resources for various NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
projects including: simulating space shuttle
Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle was a manned orbital rocket and spacecraft system operated by NASA on 135 missions from 1981 to 2011. The system combined rocket launch, orbital spacecraft, and re-entry spaceplane with modular add-ons...
launches for future space missions, projecting the impact of human activity on weather patterns, by designing safe, efficient space exploration vehicles and aircraft
Aircraft
An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air, or, in general, the atmosphere of a planet. An aircraft counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines.Although...
.
The NAS houses the Columbia Supercomputer
Columbia (supercomputer)
Named in honor of the crew who died in the Columbia disaster, Columbia is a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics for NASA. Its main purpose was to simulate the violent collision and merger of spiral galaxies that lead to the formation of elliptical galaxies...
, a 10,240-processor supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
built from 20 SGI Altix systems, each powered by 512 Intel Itanium 2
Itanium
Itanium is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture . Intel markets the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems...
processor
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
s.
The NAS also makes extensive use of the Condor cycle scavenger
Condor cycle scavenger
Condor is an open source high-throughput computing software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks....
to distribute large computations across multiple computers.
As of 2009, ANS has three supercomputers.
From oldest to newest:
Schiller Supercomputer:
40 nodes, 640 cores
Corés
Corés is one of fifteen parishes in Somiedo, a municipality within the province and autonomous community of Asturias, in northern Spain.It is in size, with a population of 31 . The postal code is 33842....
30 TFlops
Columbia Supercomputer:
14,336 cores (used to be 10,240)
88 TFlops
Pleiades
Pleiades
Pleiades can refer to:Astronomy and science*Pleiades , an open cluster of stars in the constellation Taurus**Pleiades in folklore and literature, interpretations and traditional meanings of the star cluster among various human cultures...
Supercomputer (seven daughters of Atlas
Atlas
An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a map of Earth or a region of Earth, but there are atlases of the other planets in the Solar System. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats...
)
6,400 nodes (two quad-core processors per node), 51,200 cores
600 TFlops