NASA has announced its most powerful supercomputer to date, dubbed "Aitken."
However, the new top dog is not a newly built multi-billion dollar computing beast, but rather a modular update to a machine first released in 2019.
Named for famed American astronomer Robert Grant Aitken, the high-powered unit resides in NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Facility (NAS) Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF) at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
What can you do?
The newly upgraded machine has a peak performance of 13,12 petaflops, with a sustained performance of 9,1 petaflops, a big boost from the peak of 3,69 petaflops, and a sustained performance of 2,38 petaflops that it boasted of when it first launched. first time.
Improved stats earn it number 58, placing it on the Top500 (opens in a new tab) list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
The big performance boost comes from just four HPE Apollo racks, which use 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 how the Sun's magnetic fields connect and disconnect with those of Earth's magnetosphere.
Additionally, aerospace engineers are expected 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 variety of other researchers in aeronautics, space exploration, earth sciences and astrophysics.
In addition to sheer raw power, the pumped-up Aitken also brings enhanced durability credentials to the table; using 14% less energy for cooling and reducing water consumption by 96%.
This is an exciting time for the high-performance computing (HPC) industry, as this area is enjoying a great deal of attention and innovation.
Europe has just received its first JUPITER exascale computer, which resides at the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany and is expected to go live in 2024. The power of the machine will be used for climate modeling, materials engineering, biological simulations and research. on sustainable energy production.
Currently, the only exascale computer in the Western world is Frontier, an AMD-powered machine housed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, USA.
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