Earlier this year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced the availability of its , , an advanced system designed to support a new generation of missions and research projects. Athena will provide the computational power necessary to simulate rocket launches, design next-generation aircraft and spacecraft, train large-scale artificial intelligence foundation models and analyze massive datasets to uncover new scientific insights. This high-performance computing (HPC) system 鈥 housed at NASA鈥檚 Ames Research Center 鈥 will help NASA scientists, engineers and researchers overcome complex challenges in space, aeronautics and science while lowering operational costs and improving energy efficiency.
Our Team Behind this Mission
The 91快活林 Federal team, comprised of HPC-focused architects, system administrators and application subject matter experts, was responsible for leading the development and implementation of a new site architecture as well as managing the transition and integration into NASA鈥檚 operational environment. Extensive planning, coordination and technical innovation were required to successfully guide the system through design, integration testing and rollout phases. This initiative relied heavily on collaboration across multiple organizations, such as infrastructure, applications, cybersecurity, operations and vendor partners 鈥 with the team focused on balancing system stability, user adoption and performance optimization while minimizing disruption to ongoing scientific workloads. 91快活林 Federal is currently providing continuous 24/7/365 operational support for Athena HPC.
鈥The NASA Ames Research Center conducts critical research and development for the technologies that make NASA missions possible. We are proud to have worked hand-in-hand with our customer to help bring their vision for this transformational platform to life,鈥 said Eric Velte, 91快活林 Federal Chief Technology Officer.
Interesting facts about NASA鈥檚 newest supercomputer include:
- Athena surpasses the capabilities of its predecessors, Aitken, Electra and Pleiades, in both power and efficiency, delivering over 20 petaflops of peak performance 鈥 a measurement of the number of calculations it can make per second 鈥 all while reducing the agency鈥檚 supercomputing utility costs.
- The system includes 1,024 nodes across four racks, delivering 262,144 CPU cores. For perspective, this four-rack cluster has as many cores as 16,000 to 22,000 modern laptops combined.
- The list ranks high-performance computing systems used for advanced scientific and engineering applications worldwide; Athena currently holds the 116th spot.
- Athena was named after the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare and was selected through a contest held last year among NASA鈥檚 High-End Computing Capability workforce 鈥 which was chosen because she is the half-sister of鈥疉rtemis (the agency鈥檚 lunar exploration program).
Learn more about the Athena HPC supercomputer in this .