NASA‘s New $50 Million Supercomputer – Could You Game on It?
NASA recently activated its newest supercomputing beast, the Aitken system, named after American astronomer Robert Grant Aitken. This massively parallel machine cost around $50 million to construct – a bargain by the stratospheric standards of high performance computing. As a passionate gamer and hardware enthusiast, I‘m fascinated by specs that rival a small city‘s power consumption! Let‘s analyze its capabilities and see if it would suffice for gaming.
Impressive Hardware Muscle
Make no mistake – the Aitken supercomputer sits firmly in the big leagues. Its 51,200 Intel Xeon processing cores provide an astonishing 488 trillion calculations per second of theoretical peak performance. That‘s about 50,000 times more cores than a blazing 12-core AMD Ryzen CPU aimed at consumers!
Digging deeper:
- 192GB RAM per Node – Crazy compared to even 64GB on enthusiast PCs
- 7.6 Petabyte Disk Storage – 7.6 million gigs!
- Xeon CPUs Optimized for Parallel Workloads
Clearly these parts are out of a gamer‘s budget! But they enable specialized software to harness incredible computing horsepower.
| Hardware | Consumer Desktop | Aitken Supercomputer |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $5K | $50 million |
| Cores | 12 | 51,200 |
| RAM | 64GB | 192GB (per node) |
| Storage | 4TB SSD | 7.6 petabytes |
Visual Processing? Not So Much…
Given its pedigree, where does Aitken fall short for gaming? Graphics processing. NASA optimizes supercomputers like this for specialized workloads, not real-time 3D rendering. While it packs insane CPU muscle, expectations for visual frame rates would need calibrating.
Without beefy GPUs like Nvidia‘s best gaming cards, textures and frame rates would crawl unbearably slow. Technically you could load up a game, but the experience would never satisfy gamers used to buttery smooth 4K experiences. Think single-digit FPS and disconnecting from servers!
That said, who wouldn‘t want an hour of tinkering time on such powerful silicon? I‘d happily run compute-intensive benchmarks and marvel at the number crunching capability!
Trickle-Down Performance
While we can‘t game on a $50 million NASA machine, consumer hardware continually benefits from supercomputing innovation. Techniques like pairing GPUs and CPUs evolve first in the rarefied air of high performance computing.
As costs decline, enthusiasts can build homebrew "supercomputers" from off-the-shelf servers. For under $10,000, you can harness surprising capabilities that once cost millions. AI research, video encoding, physics simulations – massive computing muscle gets democratized for ordinary users.
Gamers win too. Cutting-edge processors and graphics tech make their way from supercomputers to the mass market. That affordable 12-core Ryzen CPU powering your rig shares DNA with processors running advanced aerospace simulations. And your next GPU may borrow optimizations borne of arcane nuclear research!
So while I won‘t play the next Elder Scrolls chapter on Aitken itself, its bleeding edge hardware indirectly benefits the toys that land on my desk. What dazzling capabilities will trickle down to gamers in 2025? If history predicts the future, breaching the 1000 FPS barrier may not stay exclusive to supercomputing rigs for long!
