NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer Upgraded, Harpertown Nodes Repurposed
System engineers in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division have upgraded the Pleiades supercomputer and repurposed its original hardware to help meet NASA's ever-increasing requirements for high-performance computing cycles.
The multi-phase upgrade, completed at the end of August 2013, adds 46 racks of SGI's newest-generation ICE X systems, containing Intel Xeon E5-2680V2 (Ivy Bridge) processors. With the upgrade, Pleiades' overall peak performance has increased nearly 62%, from 1.78 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second) to 2.87 petaflops. The new racks replace 64 racks of previous-generation SGI Altix ICE systems containing Intel Xeon 5400 (Harpertown) processors, and provide 3.77 times the peak performance of the older systems.
At the same time, the Harpertown racks, installed with the original Pleiades system in 2008, have been repurposed into a new supercomputer cluster, Merope, named after one of the seven stars that make up the Pleiades star cluster. Merope was made available on September 16th to NASA scientists and engineers working on missions across the agency, and will also be used for testing purposes.The newly configured system is capable of 61 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second) of peak performance.
