Behind the scenes at NASA’s computer powerhouse

“Pleiades, a vast 210,000-processor supercomputer housed in a rear office building at the NASA Ames campus, might be considered the central nervous system for government research. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Pleiades is churning away at hundreds of unique simulations and algorithms shared between government scientists coast to coast. Among its common tasks, the supercomputer is analyzing Earth’s ocean currents and the durability of a space probe’s fuselage, and determining if a distant glimmer of starlight may reveal an undiscovered planet.

 “If you had every human on Earth doing calculations, it would take 300 years to match the calculations Pleiades can do in a second,” he [(Piyush Mehrotra, chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility)] said, matter-of-factly. “Think about it as 40,000 to 50,000 workstations or laptops, the kind that you’d have at home, working together simultaneously.”

The supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center on Aug. 20, 2015. Photo by Michelle Le

Surprisingly, the engineering of Pleiades isn’t much different from a home personal computer. At one time, supercomputers were almost entirely custom-built machines filled with a handful of specially designed chips streamlined for performance.

In the mid-1990s, NASA computer engineers were among the first to break out of that mold by building a supercomputer based on commodity parts — that is, the same chips available on the retail market. Clustering a multitude of cheap mass-produced processors turned out to be a much cheaper way to maximize performance.”

Read it all at mv-voice.com.

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