NASA Advanced Supercomputer (NAS)
a part of NASA Earth Exchange (NEX)
Pleiades
11,776 Nodes
237 TB of Memory (RAM)
9.3 PB of Storage
Much of it is tape storage
1.24 Petaflops
(1,240,000,000,000,000 operations per second!)
Storage
In addition to the 9.3 PB on Pleiades
Lou1 & Lou2 - Combined 115 PB
Data is stored on disk and migrated to tapes as needed
There is no quota on space use, but you are limited to 250,000 files
Two copies of your data are written to two separate tape media in silos located in two different buildings
(it's backed up)
What is Pleiades used for?
- Are there other Earth-like planets that could support life?
- How was our galaxy formed?
- Ocean circulation and climate models
- Researching the next generation space launch vehicle
Using Pleiades
- Runs Linux
- Everything is done in Shell (BASH)
- Log in using ssh (and a few dozen passwords)
Software
Pleiades has many software packages installed, including:
R
MatLab
IDL
Mathematica
MPI
Python
...
NetCDF
Compilers: Intel, GCC, Fortran
Parallel Programming
- Pleiades (like our in-house unix cluster) is optimized for parallel computing.
- Split up process into many smaller pieces
- Submit a lot of smaller processes