Pleiades (supercomputer)
| Company type | Joint operation |
|---|---|
| Industry | Supercomputing |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Headquarters | Mountain View, California , United States |
Area served | NASA research projects |
| Products | Supercomputing services for NASA |
| Owner | NASA, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel |
Pleiades () is a petascale supercomputer housed at NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Division within the Ames Research Center, situated near Mountain View, California. Operated jointly by NASA, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (previously known as Silicon Graphics International), and Intel, it represents NASA's most powerful computational asset.
As of November 2019, Pleiades held the 32nd position on the TOP500 ranking, achieving a LINPACK performance of 5.95 petaflops (equivalent to 5.95 quadrillion floating-point operations per second) and reaching a peak throughput of 7.09 petaflops following its most recent hardware enhancements. The supercomputer underpins critical NASA initiatives spanning aeronautics, human space exploration, astrophysics, and Earth science disciplines.
History
Commissioned in 2008 and named after the Pleiades star cluster, the system initially ranked as the world's third fastest supercomputer with a performance of 487 teraflops. Its original configuration included 100 SGI Altix ICE 8200EX racks equipped with 12,800 Intel Xeon quad-core E5472 Harpertown CPUs interconnected through more than 20 miles of InfiniBand DDR cabling.
In 2009, the capacity was expanded by integrating ten additional racks featuring quad-core X5570 Nehalem processors, boosting total performance to 544 teraflops and elevating its position to sixth on the TOP500 list. A significant milestone occurred in 2010 with a live integration of an ICE 8200 rack that enhanced productivity by two million hours by adding nodes without interrupting operations.
Later that year, Pleiades underwent further growth with the addition of 32 SGI Altix ICE 8400 racks outfitted with six-core X5670 Westmere processors. This upgrade increased the processor count to 18,432 (totaling 81,920 cores), achieving a theoretical peak of 973 teraflops and a LINPACK result of 773 teraflops. NASA also prioritized energy efficiency improvements during this phase, attaining triple the power efficiency relative to the original hardware. Furthermore, this expansion established the largest InfiniBand interconnect network worldwide, utilizing over 65 miles of cabling.
By mid-2011, after incorporating an extra 14 ICE 8400 racks, Pleiades secured seventh place on the TOP500 list with a LINPACK rating of 1.09 petaflops. The architecture employs InfiniBand DDR and QDR connections linking compute nodes and storage systems within a partial 11-dimensional hypercube topology; some nodes feature up to twelve direct links.
In 2012, NASA collaborated with SGI and Intel to deploy 24 Altix ICE X racks powered by eight-core E5-2760 Sandy Bridge processors, replacing older quad-core Harpertown units. This upgrade increased processing power by approximately 40%, bringing totals to 126,720 cores and exceeding 233 terabytes of RAM across 182 racks. Each Sandy Bridge node supports four FDR InfiniBand network links capable of bandwidths up to 56 gigabits per second.
A comprehensive hardware overhaul commenced in early 2013 with the removal of all original Harpertown CPUs and installation of 46 SGI ICE X racks featuring ten-core Xeon E5-2680V2 Ivy Bridge processors. By August that year, peak computing capacity improved by 62%, rising from 1.78 to 2.87 petaflops. Additional upgrades between January and April 2014 added another 29 Ivy Bridge racks, elevating theoretical performance to 3.59 petaflops while decommissioning remaining Nehalem and select Westmere nodes.
Toward the end of 2014, some Westmere nodes were replaced by Intel Xeon Haswell processors, increasing theoretical peak power by one petaflop to reach 4.49 petaflops. By January 2015, further Haswell node installations pushed peak capacity up to 5.35 petaflops. In June 2016, all six-core Westmere processors were substituted with fourteen-core Intel Xeon E5-2680v4 Broadwell CPUs, boosting maximum performance to approximately 7.25 petaflops.
Role at NASA
Pleiades serves as a critical component of NASA's High-End Computing Capability (HECC) initiative, showcasing the agency's cutting-edge supercomputing resources. It facilitates precise modeling and simulation efforts across Earth science, space exploration, aeronautics research, and both human and robotic missions beyond our planet.
Prominent projects leveraging Pleiades include:
- The Kepler mission, which began in 2009 with the goal of detecting Earth-like exoplanets by observing over 200,000 stars. The extensive data gathered is analyzed on Pleiades to ascertain planetary characteristics such as size, orbital parameters, and position. By 2012, Kepler had identified 1,235 planets, including five candidates comparable in size to Earth located within habitable zones. Following the failure of reaction wheels in 2013, the mission transitioned its entire data processing workflow to Pleiades to maintain ongoing light curve evaluations.
- The design and optimization of future space launch vehicles through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations run on Pleiades, aimed at enhancing performance while controlling costs. Additionally, CFD techniques have been employed to mitigate noise generated by aircraft landing gear by pinpointing specific structural noise sources.
- Astrophysical simulations focused on galaxy formation processes, such as analyzing the Milky Way’s disk configuration and mapping dark matter distribution. Utilizing Pleiades has enabled extensive dark matter modeling that uncovers gravitationally bound substructures within galaxies.
- The Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) Project—a joint effort between MIT and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—uses Pleiades for visualizing ocean current patterns. These model-data integrations assist in quantifying the ocean’s influence on the global carbon cycle, tracking polar ocean changes, and monitoring exchanges of heat, water, and chemical elements throughout Earth's systems.
In popular culture
- In the 2015 movie The Martian, the character Rich Purnell, an astrodynamicist, utilizes the Pleiades supercomputer to confirm spacecraft gravity assist computations. Unlike its cinematic depiction, actual access to Pleiades is performed remotely via ssh secured with SecurID authentication.