NASA Goddard to increase computing capacity to 5 petaFLOPS under newest CSRA contract
NewsJanuary 18, 2018
FALLS CHURCH, Va. Technology/IT contractor CSRA acquired another compute expansion under its high performance computing (HPC) contract with NASA?s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC); this latest HPC system expansion represents the 14th incremental expansion of the Scalable Compute Unit (SCU14) architecture used at the Goddard HPC center.
The expansion will support the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), a central HPC resource pool for NASA-sponsored scientists and engineers with the mission of enabling scientists to increase their understanding of the earth, the solar system, and the universe by supplying a range of advanced computing and data analytics solutions.
The NCCS’s integrated set of computational capabilities has expanded to include a private cloud, known as the Advanced Data Analytics Platform (ADAPT); the Data Analytics and Storage System (DASS), which combines HPC and storage services into a single, datacentric analytics system; remote visualization, which uses intensive processing technology within the HPC environment to render images sent back to users' desktops; mass storage, including a data archive; and an enhancement to NASA’s Discover Supercomputer (the core HPC system). The latest augmentation of Discover brings its compute capacity to approximately 5 petaFLOPS (a petaFLOP is a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (10 to the 15th power) floating-point operations per second.
"This HPC expansion brings our compute capacity to over 50 petaFLOPS for all CSRA HPC contracts across the federal government,” said Sharon Hays, Ph.D., director of CSRA’s HPC Center of Excellence. “This HPC expansion will help NASA researchers meet their mission objectives and bring a greater understanding of the earth’s climate system."
