Pleiades Supercomputer (Decommissioned December 2025)

Pleiades supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility

Pleiades was a distributed-memory SGI/HPE ICE cluster connected with InfiniBand in a dual-plane hypercube technology. Originally deployed in 2008, Pleiades had been expanded many times and was one of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

The system contained the following types of Intel Xeon processors: E5-2680v4 (Broadwell), E5-2680v3 (Haswell), E5-2680v2 (Ivy Bridge), and E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge). Pleiades was named after the astronomical open star cluster of the same name.

System Architecture (Final Configuration)

Pleiades Node Detail
  Broadwell Nodes Haswell Nodes Ivy Bridge Nodes Sandy Bridge Nodes
Number of Nodes 1,980 2,016 5,220 1,512
Processors per Node 2 fourteen-core processors per node 2 twelve-core processors per node 2 ten-core processors per node 2 eight-core processors per node
Node Types Intel Xeon E5-2680v4 processors Intel Xeon E5-2680v3 processors Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 processors Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors
Processor Speed 2.4 GHz 2.5 GHz 2.8 GHz 2.6 GHz
Cache 35 MB for 14 cores 30 MB for 12 cores 25 MB for 10 cores 20 MB for 8 cores
Memory Type DDR4 FB-DIMMs DDR4 FB-DIMMs DDR3 FB-DIMMs DDR3 FB-DIMMs
Memory Size 4.6 GB per core, 128 GB per node 5.3 GB per core, 128 GB per node 3.2 GB per core, 64 GB per node (plus 3 bigmem nodes with 128 GB per node) 2 GB per core, 32 GB per node
Host Channel Adapter InfiniBand FDR host channel adapter and switches InfiniBand FDR host channel adapter and switches InfiniBand FDR host channel adapter and switches InfiniBand FDR host channel adapter and switches
Subsystems
  8 Front-End Nodes PBS server pbpspl1 PBS server pbspl3
Number of Processors 2 eight-core processors per node 2 16-core processors per node 2 16-core processors per node
Processor Types Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge) processors AMD EPYC 7320P processors AMD EPYC 7320P processors
Processor Speed 2.6 GHz 4 GHz 4 GHz
Memory 64 GB per node 72 GB per node 16 GB per node
Connection 10 Gigabit and 1 Gigabit Ethernet connection N/A N/A

Interconnects

Operating Environment

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