News 2018
NASA’s Electra Supercomputer Rises to 12th Place in the U.S. on the TOP500 List
Recently expanded, NASA’s first modular supercomputer has moved to 12th place in the ranking of the most powerful computers in the United States, and is 33rd worldwide on the November 2018 TOP500 list.
NASA Brings its Science and Supercomputing Advances to Annual Conference
Explore some of NASA's latest discoveries and innovations that inspire people the world over. Enabled by the agency's powerful supercomputers, we are building a better launch pad for NASA's most powerful rocket, designing safer and quieter rotorcraft, improving flood and drought forecasts, and shedding light on the origin of swirling disks in the galaxies. All this and more will be showcased at SC18 in Dallas, November 12–15.
Supercomputing the Secrets of Giant Stars
Supercomputing power and algorithms help astrophysicists untangle giant stars’ brightness, temperature, and chemical variations. Researchers used the Pleiades supercomputer to perform some of their simulations. Read the full paper from Nature.
Read more about how supercomputers revealed the secrets of giant stars
Hidden Secrets of Pulsars Revealed by Trippy Computer Simulations
A simulation run on NASA's Pleiades and Discover supercomputers yields a more detailed understanding of the complex, high-energy environment around spinning neutron stars called pulsars. Read more about the NASA project.
NASA Leverages HPC for Asteroid Defense
NASA has been actively working to understand and mitigate the risks posed by asteroids for a decade. Much of this work currently takes place in California as part of the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project (ATAP) at NASA Ames, using the Pleiades supercomputer.
Why Do Galaxies Start Out as Cosmic Pickles?
A geometric mystery from deep space is sharpening the computer models used to understand the complex history of the universe and to peer into its far future. Modeling efforts including the Bolshoi-Planck simulation of large-scale structure run on our Pleiades system, NASA's most powerful supercomputer.
240 Cubic Miles Of Magma Was Just Discovered Beneath California's Supervolcano
Geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey’s California Volcano Observatory used seismic tomography to measure the Long Valley Caldera, one of the largest supervolcanoes in the world. Running the data through NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer, the researchers were able to map the reservoir of magma beneath the caldera and estimate the likelihood of a supereruption.
New and Improved Way to Find Baby Planets
New work from an international team of astronomers used archival radio telescope data to develop a new method for finding very young extrasolar planets. The research leveraged computing resources at the NAS facility. Finding more baby planets will help astronomers answer many outstanding questions about planet formation, including the process by which our own Solar System came into existence.
Read more about how supercomputers are helping find baby planets
Lunar Swirl Features Reproduced by Modeling Solar Wind Standoff
Researchers at the Institute for Modeling Plasma, Atmospheres and Cosmic Dust (IMPACT) at the University of Colorado Boulder, used NASA's Pleiades supercomputer to develop the first 3D simulations to disentangle the movement of ions and electrons as the solar wind interacts with lunar magnetic anomalies. The researchers used Pleiades and lunar satellite observations to show that solar wind standoff can reproduce lunar swirl features.
Read more about how supercomputers are used to reproduce lunar swirls
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Science Data Pipeline
NASA’s ongoing search for life in the universe produces a lot of data. The agency’s new planet-hunting mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will collect 27 gigabytes per day—and our Pleiades supercomputer will process TESS’s biweekly data deluge of almost 10 billion pixels in three to five days.
How Much Snow Accumulates in North America Each Year? More Than Scientists Thought
Scientists at The Ohio State University have revised an estimate of snow volume for the entire continent, and discovered that snow accumulation in a typical year is 50% higher than previously thought. So far, they have used 1.8 million core-hours on the Pleiades supercomputer and produced about 16 terabytes of data to run their regional climate computer models.
Read more about simulations of snow accumulation in North America
‘Handyman Of Proteins’ Got Life Started
Researchers at NASA Ames are running supercomputer simulations of hypothetical ancient proteins to better understand the origin and evolution of life in the Universe.
Read more about simulations of hypothetical proteins may have started life
Design Software Transforms How Commercial Jetliners Are Built
The NAS Division's award-winning Pegasus 5 modeling and simulation software is used by industry for the design and development of commercial aircraft and spacecraft. The story of Pegasus 5 is featured in the 2018 NASA Spinoff publication.
Galactic Center: Scientists Take Viewers to the Center of the Milky Way
Scientists in the University of Delaware's Department of Physics & Astronomy created an immersive 360-degree visualization of the center of the Milky Way galaxy using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Hydrodynamic simulations and visualization computations were run on the NAS facility's Pleiades supercomputer.
Read more about this immersive 360 experience of the galactic center
