NASA@SC18

Supercomputing

30 Years of NASA Supercomputing

Overview

2018 marks NASA’s 60th anniversary and the Supercomputing (SC) Conference series 30th anniversary. While mission-driven computing spans nearly the entire history of the agency, the last 30 years are notable for a million-fold growth in processing power, wide diversity in computer architectures, and vital contributions to agency missions. Throughout the last 30 years, NASA’s pioneering high-performance computing (HPC) achievements have enabled remarkable advances for agency missions.

Project Details

Serving thousands of scientists and engineers are NASA’s principal HPC facilities—the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Facility at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, and the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. NAS, NCCS, and predecessor organizations have housed large-scale computers since the 1960s.

At the time of the Supercomputing 1988 conference, NASA supercomputers had collective processing power of just over 20 gigaflops. Most of the architectures were vector processor systems with 1 to 8 CPUs, including the world’s first Cray-2 supercomputer at NAS. NASA also had early massively parallel systems with large CPU counts. NASA Goddard’s first-of-its-kind Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor and NASA Ames’ Thinking Machines CM-2 corralled 16,000 or more microprocessors.

Ensuing decades saw NASA systems with world-leading performance, such as Goddard’s Cray T3E ranking number 5 in 1997 and NAS’s Columbia SGI Altix system ranking number 2 in 2004. Among the agency’s many computing innovations: Goddard’s 1994 Beowulf, an inexpensive parallel workstation combining commodity PCs, Ethernet interconnects, and the open source Linux operating system—an approach that revolutionized supercomputer design for years to come; and Ames’ leadership in the single-system image (SSI) paradigm, starting in 1995 with the 64-processor Turing system, and resulting in the 512-processor Kalpana system in 2003 and Columbia in 2007, with the world’s first 2,048-processor SSI node.

Today at SC18, NASA’s computing capacity stands at nearly 20 petaflops. Among current deployments is Electra—NASA’s prototype modular computing system. Housed in two containers near the NAS building, this nearly 125,000-core SGI ICE X system leads the industry in power usage effectiveness and reduces water usage by 90 percent over traditional facilities.

Results and Impact

Through radical technological change, NASA supercomputing continues to focus on advancing agency missions.

Aeronautics: NAS applications range from reducing airplane noise and environmental impacts to developing cutting-edge concepts such as low-boom supersonic aircraft and rotary wing Urban Air Mobility vehicles.

Our Planet: NCCS has supported climate change projections for six Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports and is empowering NASA meteorologists to run some of the highest-resolution simulations by a U.S. global weather model.

Space Exploration: NAS was instrumental in return to flight of the Space Shuttle after the 2003 Columbia tragedy and is now hosting design and testing of the next-generation Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew vehicle.

The Universe: NAS has enabled solar eclipse and space weather predictions, one of the largest-ever dark-matter cosmological simulations, and data processing for the Kepler and TESS missions discovering thousands of exoplanets.

Why HPC Matters

While expanding capacity to several hundred thousand cores, NAS and NCCS work closely with users to ensure architectures are well suited to their mission applications. The facilities also provide high system availability for uninterrupted access to computational resources and user data.

What's Next

As agency supercomputing requirements continue to grow, the facilities have plans to increase resources for the next decade or more. NASA will also build upon emerging efforts in data analytics, cloud computing, and centralized storage and will soon offer a cloud computing service with secure and supported access to commercial cloud resources.

More Information

Tsengdar Lee, NASA Headquarters
tsengdar.j.lee@nasa.gov