Jun 19 2012
From The Space Library
RELEASE: 12-206 NASA'S PLEIADES SUPERCOMPUTER GETS A LITTLE MORE OOMPH
WASHINGTON -- NASA's flagship Pleiades supercomputer just received a boost to help keep pace with the intensive number-crunching requirements of scientists and engineers working on some of the agency's most challenging missions. Pleiades is critical for the modeling, simulation and analysis of a diverse set of agency projects in aeronautics research, Earth and space sciences and the design and operation of future space exploration vehicles. The supercomputer is located at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. An expansion completed earlier this month has increased Pleiades' sustained performance rate by 14 percent to 1.24 petaflops -- or a quadrillion calculations per second. To put this enormous number into perspective, if everyone in the world did one calculation per second for eight hours a day, it would take about 370 days to complete what this supercomputer can calculate in 60 seconds. "As we move toward NASA's next phase in advanced computing, Pleiades must be able to handle the increasing requirements of more than 1,200 users across the country who rely on the system to perform their large, complex calculations," said Rupak Biswas, chief of the NAS division at Ames. "Right now, for example, the system is being used to improve our understanding of how solar flares and other space weather events can affect critical technologies on Earth. Pleiades also plays a key role in producing high-fidelity simulations used for possible vehicle designs such as NASA's upcoming Space Launch System." Since Pleiades' installation in 2008, NAS has performed eight major upgrades to the system. The latest expansion adds 24 of the newest generation systems containing advanced processors. More than 65 miles of cabling interconnects Pleiades nodes with data storage systems and the hyperwall-2 visualization system. Recently, scientists have counted on Pleiades for generating the "Bolshoi" cosmological simulation -- the largest simulation of its kind to date -- to help explain how galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe have evolved over billions of years. The system also has proven essential for processing massive amounts of star data gathered from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, leading to the discovery of new Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way galaxy. The upgraded capability of Pleiades will enable NASA scientists to solve challenging problems like these more quickly, using even larger datasets.
MEDIA ADVISORY: M12-116 NASA ADMINISTRATOR TO SPEAK WITH NEEMO 16 CREW DURING UNDERWATER 'SPACEWALK'
WASHINGTON -- NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will speak with astronaut Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, commander of the 16th NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) mission, and her fellow crewmate Timothy Peake of the European Space Agency at 4:10 p.m. EDT Wednesday, June 20 as they perform their final "spacewalk" of the mission, 63 feet below the ocean's surface. The administrator's call to the crew will air live on NASA Television. The NEEMO 16 crew has been simulating asteroid exploration on the ocean floor since June 11. They are scheduled to return to the surface June 22, after living for 12 days inside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Aquarius Underwater Laboratory off the coast of Key Largo, Fla. At the successful completion of the mission, they will have performed 16 underwater spacewalks. The NEEMO 16 mission is focusing on three particular challenges of an asteroid mission. The crew is investigating communication delays, restraint and translation techniques and optimum crew size. The isolation and microgravity environment of the ocean floor allows the NEEMO 16 crew to study and test concepts for how future exploration of asteroids could be conducted. Metcalf-Lindenburger and Peake are accompanied inside Aquarius by Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Steven Squyres of Cornell University. Squyres also was a member of NEEMO 15.
MEDIA ADVISORY: M12-117 NASA ASTRONAUT AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEWS BEFORE STATION FLIGHT
HOUSTON -- NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, making final preparations for a July launch to the International Space Station, will be available for live satellite interviews from 6 to 7 a.m. CDT Tuesday, June 26. The interviews will originate from Moscow and will be preceded at 5:30 a.m. by a feed of video documenting Williams' mission training. Williams, a record-setting astronaut who lived and worked aboard the space station for six months in 2006, will be a flight engineer on the station's Expedition 32 crew. She will become commander of Expedition 33. Williams is scheduled to launch at 9:40 p.m. CDT July 14 (8:40 a.m. July 15 Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with Flight Engineers Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency and Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Williams is a native of Needham, Mass., and a 1987 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. After earning her commission, Williams served in various roles as a Navy officer before being selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in 1998. She received a master's degree from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1995. Williams and her colleagues will be aboard the station during an exceptionally busy period that includes two spacewalks, the arrival of Japanese, U.S. commercial and Russian resupply vehicles, and an increasingly faster pace of scientific research.
