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NASA Triples the Power of its Aitken Modular Supercomputer

Click or Touch Image to Zoom and Pan Exterior photo of NASA's Aitken modular supercomputer
NASA’s Modular Supercomputing Facility at Ames Research Center. The facility houses Aitken, the agency’s newest petascale supercomputer, to help solve NASA’s most challenging problems in an environmentally conscious way that provides flexibility, power efficiency, and cost savings. Aitken’s name comes from a large impact crater on the surface of the far side of the Moon’s south pole, which was named for Robert Grant Aitken, an American astronomer who specialized in binary star systems. Derek Shaw, NASA/Ames

Engineers at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center recently expanded the agency’s newest petascale supercomputer, Aitken, with 1,024 nodes containing AMD 7742 EPYC “Rome” 64-core processors, installed across eight HPE Apollo 9000 racks. The expansion, Aitken’s first since its unveiling at Ames’ Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF) in August 2019, more than triples the system’s production capability to help solve the agency’s most challenging problems.

Measured on their own, the new nodes achieved 4.1 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second) on the LINPACK benchmark, which places them—by themselves—as the 22nd most powerful computer in the United States, and 71st worldwide, on the November 2020 TOP500 list announced November 16 at SC20. On the latest High Performance Computing Gradient (HPCG) benchmark list, also announced at SC20, the nodes reached 10th in the U.S. and 42nd in the world.

With the modular system, new computer deployments are not constrained by facility limitations; each expansion will be housed in a module with the latest technology, customized to best support each new system.
William Thigpen, NASA Ames

Combined with the system’s 1,152 Intel Xeon Gold 6248 “Cascade Lake” nodes, the new nodes bring Aitken’s total theoretical peak performance to 8.41 petaflops.

Aitken is housed in the first module of the energy-efficient MSF, located at a one-acre site near the main NAS facility. The site was developed with the infrastructure to support up to 16 modules for computing and data storage. The module containing Aitken uses an innovative cooling method uniquely suited to the San Francisco Bay Area’s temperate weather. A combination of outdoor air and fan technology cools water in a closed loop system to remove the heat generated by the computer’s processors; two adiabatic coolers adjacent to the module are used to cool the water loop when the ambient air temperature is too high.

In its first year of operation since the initial Aitken deployment, the MSF required only 16% of the energy needed for cooling, and reduced water usage by 91%, as compared with the NAS facility’s traditional computer floor. The computer system is used by scientists and engineers supporting all NASA mission directorates to support research including high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics simulations of the launch environment at Kennedy Space Center, development of aerodynamic databases for the agency’s Space Launch System, and complex flow physics critical to the development of next-generation aircraft and multi-rotor vehicles. The system also supports modeling and simulation to understand the internal dynamics and structure of rotating stars.

The new Aitken nodes are currently undergoing integration and testing, and will be available to select early users before being released to production for all users in March 2021.

—Michelle Moyer, NASA/Ames Research Center