High-End Computing Capability
Computing power to answer NASA's complex science and engineering questions
HECC Facts & Highlights
Some interesting tidbits related to the HECC Project's high-end computing environment.
Quick Facts
- Today's Pleiades supercomputer delivers more than 34 million times the computational power of the first Cray X-MP supercomputer at the NAS facility in 1984.
- Current HECC systems take just 9.9% of the electrical power of our systems 6 years ago to produce the same computations (based on Pleiades Sandy Bridge nodes producing 10.8 gigaflops per core, with a 1,152-core rack consuming 30 kva).
- HECC supports about 1,700 users from around the U.S., with over 500 projects running at any one time.
- Number of days it would take every person in the world to complete one minute of Pleiades' calculations if they each performed one calculation per second, eight hours per day: 2,157.
- The tape in the mass storage systems at the NAS facility would stretch 33,927 miles—making it long enough to completely wrap around the Earth at the equator.
Real-World Impacts
Here are a few examples of the real-world science accomplishments enabled by our supercomputing resources over the years.
- Kepler Planetary Search: The Pleiades supercomputer has proven essential for processing massive amounts of star data gathered from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, leading to the discovery of new Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way. Once researchers at the Kepler Science Operations Center (SOC) calibrate pixels, combine them to form light curves, and correct for errors, copies of the data are transmitted to Pleiades for processing of light curves from the more than 200,000 observed stars. These analyses typically take about 3 days to run on Pleiades versus more than a month on SOC computers.
- Hurricane Tracking & Prediction: Simulations of Cyclone Nargis (2008), produced using Pleiades and cutting-edge visualization techniques, were the first to show the genesis of this devastating tropical storm five days in advance. Research scientists supporting NASA's Earth Science Technology Office needed hundreds of thousands of processors for each simulation to improve the understanding of tropical storm genesis and intensification, and to extend prediction-time for tropical storms to help save lives and property.
- Ocean & Sea Ice State: Scientists at NASA and MIT on the Estimating the Climate and Circulation of the Ocean 2 (ECCO2) project are using advanced computation to reconstruct the day-to-day state of the Earth's ocean and sea-ice system. In addition to helping develop core understanding of how the ocean and sea-ice system works, this information is being used to provide scientific input for real-world issues including: monitoring the ocean atmosphere exchange of carbon dioxide; forecasting the likely impact of pollutant plumes, such as the Deep Water horizon; and improving estimates of Antarctic glacial melting.
- Heart Assist Device: Simulations of blood flows within the human circulatory system were crucial to development of the NASA-DeBakey Ventricular Assist Device (VAD). Using knowledge gained from shuttle technology, CFD experts made improvements to the VAD design to increase blood flow circulation and reduce clotting—improving the lives of hundreds of heart failure patients around the world.
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HECC Total CPU Hours
The approximate number of CPU hours delivered by HECC since August 2008:
