NASA’s foremost supercomputer, Pleiades, ranks sixth in the U.S. on the July 2015 TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers, and holds the 11th spot worldwide, as announced at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
With performance upgrades over the past nine months, the computing power of Pleiades, located at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, jumped nearly 21 percent over the November 2014 TOP500 result, as measured on the LINPACK Benchmark, widely used in the high-performance computing community. Running the High Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) Benchmark, a new benchmark for ranking systems, Pleiades’ sustained performance was measured such that the system placed fifth in the world and third in the U.S.
These improvements provide the increased computing power needed to support the modeling and simulation requirements of NASA missions in aeronautics, exploration and science. Applications have included modeling fluid dynamics phenomena and full aerospace vehicles, Earth’s weather and climate, solar physics and the formation of the universe, and much more. All of these disciplines require high-fidelity modeling of complex systems and processes—including detailed analyses and visualizations of large-scale data, enabled by supercomputing—to advance human knowledge.
To learn more, visit:
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/publications/articles/feature_Pleiades_Thigpen.html
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