NASA’s Newest Supercomputer Gets a Power Boost
NASA’s Aitken supercomputer is getting a power boost that will be available to scientists and engineers across the country next week. The system is installed at the Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Calif. The expansion of four new HPE Apollo system racks with 512 Rome nodes brings Aitken’s total node count to 2,688, with 242,688 cores—more CPU cores than any other NASA supercomputer.
Ranking among the most powerful supercomputers in the world at number 84—before the expansion—on the Top500 list released on November 14, 2021, Aitken’s new nodes bring the system’s theoretical peak performance to 10.76 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second). This sizeable computational speedup—a 28% increase in performance—translates to solving larger problems with faster results for important NASA research projects in aeronautics, human and robotic space missions, Earth science, and astrophysics.
Recently, Aitken was a key resource for scientists combining a global atmospheric model and an oceanic model to run a high resolution, realistic simulation of air-sea interactions around the world. Researcher Dimitris Menemenlis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was enthusiastic about the results, saying “we’re able to simulate them in a very realistic way now, given the amazing computers that are made available to us. We’re just so excited about this.”
Aiming far beyond our planet, researchers at NASA Ames simulated a flight test for the agency’s Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiments (ASPIRE) project, to better understand the physics of inflating a 65-foot parachute that will be used for Mars robotic systems during entry, descent, and landing. The simulations run on Aitken can reduce the reliance of parachute design on expensive real-world flight tests.
Originally launched in summer 2019 and then expanded in spring 2021, Aitken is housed in the first module of the MSF, located on a one-acre site with the infrastructure to support a total of 16 modules for computers and data storage. This potential for future expansion highlights a significant benefit of using the modular approach: the flexibility to construct additional modules and add computing power relatively quickly to meet changing priorities and respond to new challenges for agency missions.
Besides installing all the new hardware, the expansion also involved installing a new cooling distribution unit to support the new racks. The MSF’s energy-efficient cooling system uses a combination of outdoor air and fan technology that cools water in a closed loop system to remove the heat generated by the computer’s processors, along with two adiabatic coolers next to the module used to cool the water loop.
Over the next two years, NASA will install a new compute module and a new data module at the MSF. The addition of the data module will allow maintenance to be performed on any of the supercomputing facilities at Ames while still keeping systems running so that scientists and engineers can run their simulations.
In the meantime, NAS system engineers will soon add four more Aitken racks to completely fill up the MSF’s first module—a milestone for NASA’s newest supercomputing facility.
—Jill Dunbar, Michelle Moyer, NASA Ames Research Center