The NASA, Intel and SGI in joint venture

May 7, 2008

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Today, the NASA, Intel Corp. and SGI have announced the official signing of an agreement establishing their intention to collaborate on significantly increasing the space agency's overall supercomputer performance and capacity over the next five years.

Under the specific terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA will work closely with Intel and SGI in significantly increasing computational capabilities for computer modeling and simulation at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility in Moffett Field, CA.

NASA-Ames, Intel and SGI will work together on a project called Pleiades to develop a complex computational platform with a capacity of one Petaflops peak performance (1,000 trillion operations per second) by next year.

The project will also integrate a system with a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10,000 trillion operations per second) in four years from now.

NASA's Ames Director Pete Worden said "achieving such an important boost in performance will help fulfill NASA's increasing need for additional computing capacity, and will empower us in providing the computational performance and capacity needed for future missions."

Worden added "this additional computational performance is necessary to help us achieve breakthrough scientific discoveries."

Additionally, this project builds on the 2004 deployment of Columbia, which generated a tenfold increase in supercomputing capacity for the agency. Meeting NASA's future mission challenges will require additional computational resources to handle increasingly higher fidelity modeling and simulation.

Next year, NASA expects to increase that computing capability 16 times with the Pleiades project, and by an additional tenfold in 2012.

Robert Ewald, chief executive officer of SGI said "throughout its history, NASA has sought to explore the most compelling questions about mankind, Earth, and the worlds that await our discovery."

"Today, SGI is very proud to be part of this effort. These groundbreaking new systems powered by SGI and fueled by the latest multi-core Intel processors, offer a platform for new discoveries that will help us all achieve the most promising future for the human race."

Diane Bryant, v.p. of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group said "Intel, working with SGI, is proud to play an important role in helping NASA expand the pursuit of scientific discovery."

"Systems such as Pleiades challenge the imagination, and guide our exploration of Earth, space and beyond. As we approach performance that was once thought impossible to achieve, our eyes are opened even wider to the vast possibilities enabled by supercomputing," added Bryant.

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Source: The NASA.

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