NASA Upgrades HPC Platform

By DE Editors

NASA has select SGI’s ICE high performance computing (HPC) platform, code-named Carlsbad 3.0, to extend the computational capability of the agency’s Pleiades supercomputer system. The expansion will take place in the first quarter of 2012, and will include the latest Carlsbad 3.0 infrastructure, power and cooling technology, future Intel Xeon processor E5 Romley family, and an FDR dual-plane, hypercube-topology InfiniBand network.

Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA continues to work with SGI and Intel to increase the computational capabilities for research, modeling and simulation work at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., with the ultimate goal of attaining 10 petaflops of peak performance.

The new system will be integrated into the Pleiades supercomputer, currently ranked the seventh most powerful HPC system in the world. The augmentation will consist of more than 1,700 compute nodes with 32 GB/node, adding approximately 35 percent to the peak capability of Pleiades in early 2012.

For more information, visit SGI.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.