Intel builds 10PFlops supercomputer for NASA

Nasa is working with Intel and SGI on a new supercomputer under the name Pleiades that should be able to deliver a computing capacity of 1Pflops in 2009. Three years later, the performance should have increased tenfold.

The American space agency NASA is expanding the NASA Advanced Supercomputing division of the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field with a supercomputer built by Intel and SGI. With a computing power of 1Pflops planned for 2009, the new computing monster has to beat its predecessor, the Columbia, by a large margin. The now aging Columbia, with its 10,240 Itanium 2 processors, which run at 1.5GHz and 1.6GHz and have 9MB L3 cache, gets about 61Tflops, about sixteen times less than the Pleiades computer has to deliver.

How NASA and its partners will realize the computing power of the new supercomputer, named after a cluster of stars in the constellation Taurus, is not yet known. It is possible that quad-core Xeons will be used, which provide roughly ten times better performance than the Itaniums used in Columbia. However, the goal of crossing the 10Pflops barrier by 2012 remains ambitious. The Columbia takes twentieth place in the top 500 list of supercomputers: with 1Pflops, Pleiades would take first place. NASA will use the computing power of the new supercomputer to improve the reliability of simulations and models.