At the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, NASA has announced that its Pleiades supercomputer is now ranked seventh among the world’s most powerful computers. Sometimes it seems that in the challenge to the last petaflop the only really good supercomputer is the fastest one but the others have an extraordinary computing power as well and can be used for important purposes.

Pleiades, located at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, wasn’t certainly built to try to get to the top of the list of most powerful supercomputers in the world. The purpose of Pleiades is to meet NASA’s needs, which concern primarily aeronautics modeling and simulation projects, which include space missions, but also other fields of science and technology.

Pleiades, named after the star cluster, was installed in 2008, the result of a deal between NASA and manufacturer SGI, a world leader in the development of supercomputers. During these three years the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division (NAS) which manages Pleiades has implemented some expansions and the next year a further upgrade that will increase its computing power even more is planned.

Today Pleiades has 182 racks for a total of 11,648 nodes. Of these, 4,480 nodes contain Xeon X5670 (Westmere) processors, 1,280 nodes contain Xeon X5570 (Nehalem) processors and 5,888 nodes contain Xeon E5472 (Harpertown) processors for a total of 111,104 cores. The first two types of nodes have 24 GB of DDR3 RAM each, the last type nodes have 8 GB of DDR2 RAM each for a total of 185 TByte.

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Pleiades has a total of 6.9 PByte mass storage and to run this supercomputer there’s the Linux operating system, specifically SuSE Linux, which recently became a property of Attachmate after the acquisition of Novell.

All this power is used very efficiently as Pleiades works using almost 83% of its theoretical peak performance. Thus over a thousand people scattered around the U.S.A. can make the best use of this supercomputer to study the oceans and climate change, find ways to reduce harmful aircraft emissions and for other scientific projects.

Once again NASA’s long-term activities have a positive impact not only in advancing our scientific knowledge but also on people’s lives. Despite this, NASA’s budget is always at risk of cuts and remains a small fraction of the military budget.