The latest NASA supercomputer is a bit of a DIY masterpiece

Date:
Fri, 22 Jul 2022 21:10:20 +0000

Description:
NASA's latest supercomputer takes a modular approach to upgrades, utilizing AMD hardware...among other things.

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NASA has announced its most powerful supercomputer yet, dubbed "Aitken".

However the new top dog is not a freshly built, multi-billion dollar
computing beast, but actually a modular upgrade to a machine first launched
in 2019.

Named after famed American astronomer Robert Grant Aitken, the high-powered unit resides in the Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF) in NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility (NAS) at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. What can it do?

The freshly upgraded machine has a peak performance 13.12 petaflops, with a sustained performance of 9.1 petaflops, a huge boost compared to the maxium
of 3.69 petaflops and sustained performance of 2.38 it boasted when it first launched.

The upgraded stats give it a number 58 placing it on the Top500 list of the worlds most powerful supercomputers.

The big boost in performance comes from just four HPE Apollo racks, utilizing AMD's Rome architecture, based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture.

NASA says its scientists will use Atiken to run kinetic plasma simulations to learn more about the structures and dynamics of magnetic reconnection and the way the Suns magnetic fields connect and disconnect with those of Earths magnetosphere.

In addition, aerospace engineers are set to use Aitken's processing power to support upcoming Artemis missions by simulating the launch environment at the Kennedy Space Center.

But that's not all NASA says, Aitken will be used by a range of other researchers across the field of aeronautics, space exploration, Earth
science, and astrophysics.

In addition to mere raw power, the souped-up Aitken also brings improved sustainability credentials to the table; using 14% less energy on cooling and reducing water usage by 96%. READ MORE:

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The first exascale supercomputer in Europe could fire us to a quintillion

ops

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It's an exciting time for the high performance computing (HPC) industry as
the field enjoys a wealth of attention and innovation.

Europe just got its first exascale computer JUPITER , which resides in the Jlich Supercomputing Centre in Germany and is set to be turned on in 2024.
The machines power will be used for climate modelling, materials engineering, biological simulations, and sustainable energy production research.

Currently the only exascale computer in the western world is Frontier, an AMD powered machine hosted in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility(OLCF) inTennessee, United States. Want to run your own high-performance workloads
in the cloud? Check out our guide to the best cloud hosting



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-latest-nasa-supercomputer-is-a-diy-masterpi ece/


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