On Wednesday, NASA and IBM announced the agency has selected an IBM System p575+ supercomputer for evaluating next-generation technology to meet the agency's future supercomputing requirements. Supercomputers play a critical role in many NASA missions, including new space vehicle design, global climate studies and astrophysics research.
The IBM system is being installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., where it is undergoing testing and evaluation. With 640 computational cores and a peak performance of approximately 5.6 teraflops, the system will augment the agency's existing "Columbia" system, currently ranked as the eighth fastest supercomputer in the world.
A teraflop is a measure of a computer's speed; one teraflop can be expressed as a trillion floating point operations per second.
"With NASA's high-end computing needs expected to continue during the next few years, we need to keep pace with improved technologies. IBM's system meets all the criteria for our base system evaluation, and working closely with them, we will chart out a successful path for the NASA supercomputing environment," said Dr. Piyush Mehrotra, who leads the NAS applications group and is steering the technology upgrade effort.
The NAS supports scientists and engineers throughout the United States who work on projects such as designing spacecraft, improving weather and hurricane models, and understanding the behavior of the sun. Many NASA projects require large, complex calculations and sophisticated mathematical models that can be efficiently handled only by a supercomputer.
"The research undertaken by NASA scientists is allowing engineers to design and build safer, more advanced spacecraft more quickly than ever," said Dave Turek, vice president of Deep Computing for IBM. "Computer simulation technology produces perfect prototypes for virtual testing, reducing the need for physical testing."
The NAS technology upgrade effort used a comprehensive benchmark suite to characterize system performance on NASA-relevant applications and to measure job throughput for a workload in a complex, high-performance computing environment.
The IBM p575+ supercomputer acquisition is the first of a four-phase procurement process that eventually will replace the Columbia supercomputer system. This phased replacement supports the requirements of the agency Strategic Capabilities Assets Program (SCAP) High-End Computing Capability to provide supercomputing capability to meet the needs of NASA's programs and missions.
Source: IBM
Related stories:
Space science simulation at UNH now better, faster, cheaper
Cashing in on the underlying technology that seamlessly renders graphics for state-of-the-art video games, space scientists at the University of New Hampshire have bundled together 40 PlayStation3 consoles to affordably simulate one of the "grand challenges" of modern computational science - the interaction between Earth's magnetic field or "magnetosphere" and the solar wind. Climate change is another supercomputing grand challenge.
Supercomputer Sets New Performance Record
The world’s fastest supercomputer, BlueGene/L, set a new performance standard on June 22, 2006. Housed at Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the machine achieved a sustained performance of 207.3 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraFLOPS).
From shared to distributed memory systems for applications
Shared-memory computing applications have never taken particularly well to operating on distributed-memory systems, at least until now. A possible solution has emerged, of interest to NASA and IBM, and is being tested on their distributed computing systems.
Jupiter's formation linked to that of primitive meteorites
The process that formed the giant planet
Jupiter may also have spawned some of the tiniest and oldest members of our solar system -- millimeter-sized spheres called chondrules, the major part of the most primitive meteorites. As witnesses to the early history of the solar system, chondrules may provide important clues to how the planets formed.
A report of this research result, by theorists Alan P. Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Richard H. Durisen of Indiana University in Bloomington, will be published in the March 10 issue of
Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Swerve left to avoid that satellite
Think you have trouble getting rid of the clutter in your living room? After more than 50 years of launching rockets and satellites into space, the human race now has to deal with the clutter left behind -- or is it "above"? Dead satellites, spent rocket stages, paint flakes, and coolant from nuclear-powered satellites continue to orbit the Earth at ultrahigh velocities.
UC San Diego Unveils Highest Resolution Scientific Display System in the World
As the size of complex scientific data sets grows exponentially, so does the need for scientists to explore the data visually and collaboratively in ultra-high resolution environments. To that end, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) has unveiled the highest-resolution display system for scientific visualization in the world at the University of California, San Diego.
Ozone hole recovery may reshape southern hemisphere climate change
A full recovery of the stratospheric ozone hole could modify climate change in the Southern Hemisphere and even amplify Antarctic warming, according to scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
The largest synthesized telescope in Europe doubles its surface
The 100m Radio Telescope Effelsberg enters operations of the e-EVN network, enhancing its sensitivity to detect the radio sky providing the sharpest images in nearby real time. The European radio interferometric network e-EVN almost doubles its sensitivity with the addition of the largest radio telescope in Europe.