NASA, Intel, SGI Plan
To 'Soup Up' Supercomputer
(7 May 2008) NASA, Intel Corp., and
SGI today announced the signing of an agreement establishing intentions to
collaborate on significantly increasing the space agency's supercomputer
performance and capacity.
Under the terms of a Space Act
Agreement, NASA will work closely with Intel and SGI to increase computational
capabilities for modelling and simulation at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing
(NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field,
Calif.
"Achieving such a monumental increase in performance will help
fulfil NASA's increasing need for additional computing capacity and will enable
us to provide the computational performance and capacity needed for future
missions," said Ames Director S. Pete Worden. "This additional computational
performance is necessary to help us achieve breakthrough scientific
discoveries."
NASA Ames, Intel and SGI will work together on a project
called Pleiades to develop a computational system with a capacity of one
Petaflops peak performance (1,000 trillion operations per second) by 2009 and a
system with a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10,000 trillion operations per
second) by 2012.
"Throughout its history, NASA has sought to explore the
most compelling questions about mankind, Earth, and the worlds that await our
discovery," said Robert "Bo" Ewald, chief executive officer of SGI. "SGI is
proud to be part of this effort. These groundbreaking new systems powered by
SGI and fuelled by the latest multi-core Intel processors, offer a platform for
new discoveries that will help us all achieve the most promising future for the
human race. This effort is important to everyone on this planet."
This
collaboration builds on the 2004 deployment of Columbia, which generated a
tenfold increase in supercomputing capacity for the agency. Meeting NASA's
future mission challenges will require additional computational resources to
handle increasingly higher fidelity modelling and simulation. In 2009, NASA
expects to increase that computing capability 16 times with the Pleiades
project, and by an additional tenfold in 2012.
"Intel, working with SGI,
is proud to play an important role in helping NASA expand the pursuit of
scientific discovery," said Diane M. Bryant, vice president of Intel's Digital
Enterprise Group and general manager or Server Platforms Group, Intel Digital
Enterprise Group. "Systems such as Pleiades challenge the imagination, and
guide our exploration of Earth, space, and beyond. As we approach performance
that was once thought impossible to achieve, our eyes are opened even wider to
the vast possibilities enabled by supercomputing."
(source:
NASA)
