How Powerful is NASA‘s PC?
As a passionate gamer and content creator, I‘m always interested in the latest and greatest when it comes to computer hardware. And NASA‘s Pleiades supercomputer definitely fits that description – with a peak processing speed over 100 million times faster than a regular gaming PC, it‘s in a league of its own!
Blazing Fast Speeds – 7.25 Petaflops Per Second
Pleiades has a theoretical peak processing speed of 7.25 petaflops per second. That‘s 7.25 quadrillion calculations per second! To put it in perspective, Nvidia‘s top mainstream GPU, the RTX 3090, delivers about 36 teraflops. So Pleiades is more than 200,000 times faster!
With that kind of horsepower, Pleiades can crunch enormous datasets and run complex simulations that are critical for NASA‘s aerospace research. It would make quick work of even the most demanding games. But with its specialized architecture focused on scientific workloads, gaming performance would be poor.
Massive Scale – Roughly 150,000 CPUs
Pleiades achieves its blazing fast speed via distributed computing across lots of servers with CPUs (no consumer GPUs here). It has approximately 150,000 processing cores when you add up all the CPUs.
Again to give some context – a high-end AMD Threadripper 3990X desktop CPU has "only" 64 cores. So Pleiades has over 2,000 times more cores! Of course, its CPUs are slower individually than the latest Intel/AMD consumer chips focused on gaming. But the immense scale is what allows it to reach petaflops performance levels.
Pleiades Compute Nodes:
| Node Type | Cores per Node | Nodes | Total Cores |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Xeon E5-2695v4 | 36 | 944 | 34,016 |
| Intel Xeon Phi 7230 | 64 | 6,192 | 396,288 |
| Total | 7,136 | 430,304 |
Massive Memory Too – 938 Terabytes of RAM
In addition to compute horsepower, Pleiades also has an incredible amount of memory to store all that data it crunches – 938 terabytes total. That‘s over 900,000 GB!
Again comparing to a high-end consumer system – even a decked out Threadripper workstation build likely has only 256-512 GB of RAM. So Pleiades has about 2 million times more system memory!
All this memory allows large datasets to be processed in-memory, greatly accelerating simulation and modeling workflows.
Pushing Boundaries of Science and Space Exploration
So while Pleiades wouldn‘t play Crysis very smoothly, it‘s an absolute beast when it comes to data-intensive scientific workloads. The petaflops of processing power let NASA scientists run amazingly detailed simulations and process huge amounts of data from space instruments.
Some of the major applications include:
- Climate and weather modeling to predict hurricanes and extreme weather events
- Computational fluid dynamics simulations for advanced aerospace designs
- Cosmology simulations modeling the evolution of the entire universe
- Processing images and data from space telescopes like Hubble, James Webb, etc.
So although NASA‘s petaflop supercomputer might not replace your RTX 3090 gaming rig anytime soon, it‘s still an incredibly impressive machine! As a fellow geek, I‘m blown away by sheer scale and performance, even if I can‘t play Doom Eternal on it. The future of supercomputing looks bright thanks to cutting-edge systems like Pleiades!
