TAG | NASA’s Pleiades Project to speed up exploration of universe |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Sunday, 11 May 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 Within the terms of the Space Act Agreement, NASA will work with the two computer companies to develop and install a petaflops supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility within Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, California, U.S.A.). The acronym “FLOPS,” or flops, means FLoating point Operations Per Second. Flops is the measure of a computer’s performance. The term “peta” stands for one quadrillion (1015). In the case of computer performance, petaflops means that the computer will be able to perform 1,000 trillion calculations per second. NASA is expecting to have its one-petaflops supercomputer up and running by 2009. Then, three years later, it intends to increase its peak capacity to 10 petaflops (ten quadrillion, or 10,000 trillion operations per second). NASA will use its petaflops supercomputer to make very fast and accurate measurements in the field of “higher fidelity” modeling and simulation. For instance, NASA already is using supercomputers to model black holes. It will also help NASA to design and develop such things as hypersonic airacraft and spacesuits, and simulate the landing of spacecraft on various celestial bodies such as the Moon, Mars, and asteroids. Currently, NASA’s fastest running computer is called Columbia. As of 2004, it runs at a top speed of 88.88 teraflops, where “tera” stands for one trillion (1012). Thus, it can do one trillion calculations per second. According to the TOP500 project, it is the twentieth fastest computer in the world. Pleases turn the page for additional information of the TOP500 list, the BlueGene/L supercomputer, and what SGI and Intel officials have to say about NASA's venture into petaflops computing. |
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