Things really change very fast in the world of computers and still faster in the world of supercomputers. NASA had launched Pleiades, a supercomputer in November 2009. It was considered to be the third best supercomputer in world at that point in time. But today, almost one and a half year down the line, Pleiades has slipped to sixth position in the world of super computers. This slipping has taken place when Pleiades has doubled its power. When Pleiades was launched in 2008, it measured 487 teraflops. This measurement currently stands at 973 teraflops. In simple words, the measurement of Pleiades is 973 trillion floating point operations per second. The people at Ames Research Center in Mountain View in California, NASA’s supercomputing facility maintains that this supercomputer is the sixth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

According to ZDnet.com, Pleiades is used by the people working at NASA for their research purposes. The personnel across the agency use this supercomputer in various earth and space sciences. The Pleiades is used for conducting giant simulations. The machine is very powerful. The power of Pleiades can be gauged from the fact that it is almost fully subscribe. In simple words, the machine is in use for all 24 hours in a day and all seven days in a week.

The Pleiades is made up of numerous SGI machines. The agency maintains rack after rack of the numerous SGI machines that together make Pleiades. These racks of SGI machines are located inside the computing center. Most of the SGI machines have 512 cores, that is, about 6 teraflops. Recently the agency has included 32 more racks of SGI machines with the capacity of 768 cores.

The Pleiades has been chosen to be used by NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division, NAS. The system derives its name from an astronomical super star cluster of the same name. The system was chosen to increase the capacity of computing at NASA by 2.5 times. The scientists and engineers at NASA use high-end computing capability of Pleiades to conduct simulations and modeling for various agency missions. The supercomputer has been selected as the next generation super computer to meet the supercomputing requirements of NASA.

The system architecture of the Pleiades supercomputer includes 111 compute cabinets with the capacity of 64 nodes each. Therefore, the Pleiades consist of 7104 nodes in total. The peak cluster of Pleiades performs at the rate of 673.4 Tflop/s peak cluster. The system manufactured by SGI has 56, 832 cores in total. The memory capacity of the Pleiades is 74.7 Tb. There are 5,888 nodes in the Pleiades. Each node consists of 2 quad-core processors. The processors for each nodes are Xeon E5472 (Harpertown) processors that can process the data at the speed of 3 GHz. The supercomputer uses DDR2 FB-DIMMS type of memory for data storage as well as data processing. Each node has 8GB memory space while each core has memory of 1 GB. There are other 1216 nodes that have Xeon X570 (Nehalem) processors that process the data at the speed of 2.93GHz.