How strong are NASA PC?
Coming in at number 58 on the June 2022 Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, Aitken's theoretical peak performance is now 13.12 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second).
Since then, the most obvious advances have been in computing and electronics (especially in reducing size). The Apollo Guidance Computer had RAM of 4KB, a 32KB hard disk.
That's a ton of computing power, and it adds up to a peak speed of 7.25 petaflops per second — hundreds of thousands of times faster than your basic home computer. It has a total memory of 938 TB. All this means that it's more powerful than we (or most people) can comprehend.
| Broadwell Nodes | Sandy Bridge Nodes | |
|---|---|---|
| Processor Speed | 2.4 GHz | 2.6 GHz |
| Cache | 35 MB for 14 cores | 20 MB for 8 cores |
| Memory Type | DDR4 FB-DIMMs | DDR3 FB-DIMMs |
| Memory Size | 4.6 GB per core, 128 GB per node | 2 GB per core, 32 GB per node |
Using the processing power of 3,312 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, the team can run an ensemble of six simulations at once with NASA's FUN3D computational fluid dynamics software.
NASA's system will cost about $50 million, somewhat of a bargain price because Intel Corp.
Badly. These super computers are built for very specific tasks. They have a lot of processor power, but that processing power is designed to calculate different things like weather simulations, gravity simulations, etc. They do not even have GPUs the way NVidia and AMD make them.
But with the Z by HP data science workstations powered by two Quadro RTX 8000 GPUs, the NASA researchers were able to get supercomputing resources right at their desks.
The fastest supercomputer: Frontier — a supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) — has taken the top spot on the latest TOP500 list, and its score of 1.102 exaFLOPS on a benchmark test makes it the world's first exascale computer.
Currently the latest TOP500 list is the 60th, published in November 2022. Since June 2022, USA's Frontier is the world's most powerful supercomputer, reaching 1102 petaFlops (1.102 exaFlops) on the LINPACK benchmarks.
How fast do NASA computers run?
In the parlance of computer engineers, Pleiades is measured to consistently run at a processing speed of 4.09 petaflops, which basically refers to the number of operations the machine can do in one second.
Even by today's standards, the moon landing is a gigantic achievement. With the first successful landing on 21 July 1969, another one has not been carried out since 1972.
Typically, more cooling translates to higher use of resources, such as water and electricity. But the latest expansion in May 2022 to NASA's innovative, modular supercomputing facility increased the agency's computational power by 22%, making it NASA's most powerful, yet energy-efficient, supercomputer.
| Active | 2008 – Present |
|---|---|
| Memory | 926 terabytes. |
| Storage | 29 petabytes (RAID) |
| Speed | 5.95 petaflops (sustained), 7.09 petaflops (peak) |
| Ranking | TOP500: 32, November 2019 |
This is the case with "Aitken", which is officially the space agency's most powerful supercomputer following the addition of a mere four HPE "Apollo" racks based on AMD's "Rome" architecture. The addition of AMD nodes is notable here as the system to date has been based on Intel's "Cascade Lake".
NASA has selected SiFive to provide the core CPU for NASA's High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor. HPSC is expected to be used in virtually every future space mission, from planetary exploration to lunar and Mars surface missions.
| Architecture | Armv8.2-A SVE 512 bit With the following Fujitsu's extensions: Hardware barrier, Sector cache, and Prefetch |
|---|---|
| Memory | HBM2 32 GiB, 1024 GB/s |
| Interconnect | Tofu Interconnect D (28 Gbps x 2 lane x 10 port) |
| I/O | PCIe Gen3 x16 |
| Technology | 7nm FinFET |
- Operating System: Windows 11 Home.
- Intel Core i5-12400F.
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8GB.
- 16GB DDR4 3200MHz.
- 500GB M.2 Gen 4 Solid State Drive.
Each node consists of one CPU, 4 GPUs and 5 terabytes of flash memory. Each GPU has 128 GB of RAM soldered onto it. Frontier has coherent interconnects between CPUs and GPUs, allowing GPU memory to be accessed coherently by code running on the Epyc CPUs.
Fugaku (Japan)
It has a total of 7,630,848 cores and scores an impressive 442 PFLOPS (or petaflops), meaning it can do 442 quadrillion calculations per second.
Is NASA supercomputer good for gaming?
They are built for other things that they are (very likely) much better at then any gaming computer, but they are not good at gaming. Not any better than a good desktop.
The US's Frontier system is now the fastest supercomputer in the world. It's also the first exascale computer, meaning it can process more than a quintillion calculations per second — an ability that could lead to breakthroughs in medicine, astronomy, and more.
Intel launches the world's fastest desktop CPU - an unlocked 5.5 GHz Core i9. Intel announced at CES 2022 the 12th gen processor Core i9-12900KS, which can run at 5.5GHz max frequency. The chip can hit the speed on up to two cores for the first time, giving the ultimate performance to hardcore gamers.
Gaming DELL Optiplex Tower Computer Desktop PC. Alienware R10 Gaming Desktop. Corsair ONE i200 LE Compact PC. Maingear Vybe Gaming Desktops.
The most advanced consumer devices do not come close to supercomputing power. Supercomputer Fugaku is officially the world's most powerful supercomputer.