Today NASA announced a 1 Petaflop upgrade toPleiades, the agency’s flagship supercomputer.
Completed in October 2014, the upgrade adds 15 SGI ICE X racks (1,080 nodes) containing the latest generation of 12-core Intel Xeon E5-2680v3 (Haswell) processors. Additionally, 216 nodes of Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 (Ivy Bridge) processors, originally part of a separate test system, were also integrated into Pleiades. The new hardware increased Pleiades’ theoretical peak performance to more than 4.49 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second), a one petaflops increase from the previous configuration.
In order to accommodate the cooling and power capacity needed for the upgrade, 16 SGI Altix ICE racks containing Intel Xeon X5670 (Westmere) processors were removed from Pleiades. A portion of these racks will be integrated into the Merope supercluster over the next several months. This smaller system now consists of 704 Westmere-based nodes and 448 X5570 (Nehalem)-based nodes that provide 141 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second) of additional computing resources to NASA’s scientific and engineering users.
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