NASA’s new supercomputer is extremely powerful, but it’s not a brand new computer built from scratch with millions of dollars spent. A version of the model produced in 2019, powered by updates.
Named after the famous American astronomer Robert Grant Aitken, this high-powered supercomputer is located in the Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF) at NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing facility (NAS) at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Aitken’s performance has been increased to 13.12 petaflops with new updates. Its sustainable performance reached 9.1 petaflops. Considering the first model’s speed of 3.69 petaflops, it is clear how much its performance has improved.
With the new update, four HPE Apollo racks using AMD’s Rome architecture were added to the computer. NASA said scientists will use Aitken to run kinetic plasma simulations to learn more about the structures and dynamics of magnetic reconnection and how the Sun’s magnetic fields connect and disconnect with those in Earth’s magnetosphere.
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