NASA’s Pleiades Supercomputer Is Hard At Work For Humanity

The HeroX blog
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

We’re still just beginning to explore the usefulness of supercomputers. They’re helping us understand more about some of humanity’s most complicated challenges, and they’re still pretty new to the scene.

Supercomputers are able to simulate very complex environments, like weather and climate, astronomical events, explosions, and rocket engines. They’re also very valuable for military uses and national defense, which is one big reason why nations are willing to pour so much money into their creation and maintenance.

NASA is very interested in all this, as you might guess, which is why they’re working to improve their state-of-the-art Pleiades supercomputer. They want your help in the $55,000 High Performance Fast Computing Challenge, a contest to improve the software that this supercomputer runs on. The contest is over, but you can still keep reading to learn all about the Pleiades supercomputer, one of the most technologically advanced pieces of equipment on the planet.

The Pleiades Supercomputer

The Pleiades supercomputer is located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. It’s a part of the NASA Advanced Supercomputer Division (NAS), and is the most advanced and powerful resource in the the High-End Computing Capabilities Project (HECC), one of NASA’s initiatives to accelerate scientific progress. The other supercomputers at NAS are Electra, Endeavor, and Merope.

Supercomputers are a big deal, so each one ends up getting its own name. This one is named after the Pleiades star cluster, though the supercomputer model itself is an SGI ICE X, built by SGI.

The mission statement of HECC is “To accelerate and enhance NASA’s mission of space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research by continually ensuring optimal use of the most productive high-end computing environment in the world.”

Pleiades supercomputer at NASA Ames. Image credit: NAS

Unboxing the Pleiades

The Pleiades supercomputer consists of 161 racks full of electronics. The basic idea of this type of supercomputer is to string a ton of CPUs together so they work in parallel, all working together to solve very complex problems. It runs on a custom Linux operating system.

Within those neatly stacked shelves are 11,472 nodes, each containing some number of CPUs, for a total of 246,048 CPU cores. That’s a ton of computing power, and it adds up to a peak speed of 7.25 petaflops per second — hundreds of thousands of times faster than your basic home computer. It has a total memory of 938 TB. All this means that it’s more powerful than we (or most people) can comprehend.

Fun factoid from NASA: “If everyone in the world did one calculation per second for eight hours a day, it would take about 2,175 days to complete what Pleiades can calculate in one minute.”

Playing with the Pleiades

Many people probably imagine that you need to physically travel to the supercomputer and sit down at a terminal to use it. But that’s not the case.

Instead, the computing resources are available remotely, in the cloud. If you enter a math problem into Google search, it will compute the answer for you. In a similar way, NASA scientists, engineers, and researchers can access the computational power of Pleiades from their lab or home computer. Time on the Pleiades is precious (which is true of any supercomputer), so researchers sign up in advance to make use of the massive computational power to aid in their research.

You can actually check out some cool, easy-to-grasp stats about the current usage of the Pleiades, along with the other supercomputers at NASA Ames, at the right side of NASA’s info page. This information is more useful to researchers who want to use it, but it’s fascinating to see a report of this powerful computer in action, updated very frequently (even though, if you’re like me, you don’t know exactly what it all means).

Here are the CPU’s currently in use in the Pleiades, broken down into the four sets of nodes in the supercomputer, which are dubbed Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Broadwell.

Image credit: NAS

And here are the current jobs in progress, queued, and held.

Image credit: NAS

The Pleiades at NAS was the third-most powerful in the world when it debuted in 2008. A lot has changed in the world of supercomputing since then, and it’s now ranked as the 15th most powerful supercomputer in the world. Power isn’t everything, however — a supercomputer needs some super-software to manage all that computational potential. The incredible tech is useless unless you have some very advanced software to direct it appropriately, and the more efficient your software, the more power you can wrest from the machine.

The HeroX blog

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