NASA's Earth Day Gift Runs On a 56,832-Core, 128-Screen Climate Research Supercomputer

By Clay Dillow Posted 04.20.2010 at 4:25 pm 13 Comments

NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Facility at Ames Research Center This ain't NASA's first supercomputer.

Earth Week is upon us, and NASA has prepared a very special gift for the blue planet. Dwarfing the iPods that we customarily give each other to celebrate another year of existence, NASA put together NEX, a planetary data-crunching tool that uses a 56,832-core, 128-screen supercomputer to blend global satellite data and sophisticated modeling software with an online collaborative culture aimed at helping scientists work together toward better climate change research.

NEX, which stands for NASA Earth Exchange, provides scientists around the globe with the kind of computer power they need to quickly draw up models and gather snapshots of land use patterns, weather systems and other ecological factors that the agency hopes will increase the global output of useful, reliable climate data.

For example, using NEX, NASA scientists were able to cobble together half-trillion-pixel snapshots of global vegetation change over the past 30 years in just ten hours. That sort of data crunching would've have taken months longer without NEX's capacity for data storage and processing, not to mention access to NASA's library of Landsat images.

But perhaps more importantly, NEX will bring together researchers from across disciplines and across the globe, perhaps helping to circumvent some of the academic politicking that has stymied some earlier efforts at pulling together a comprehensive global climate study. Further, projects carried out on NEX will be available to all users, meaning not only that data sets are reusable for future projects, but data processing and analysis will all be captured, step by step, by NEX. Anyone audacious enough to try to skew the numbers will have some explaining to do.

Pleiades, the supercomputer that runs NEX, has a 1.4 petabyte capacity and will reside at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing HQ at the agency's Ames Research campus in California.

[PhysOrg]

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13 Comments

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JohnR

04/20/10 at 5:34 pm

I'm celebrating Lenin's birthday, a.k.a. earth day by burning old tires and used motor oil. I figure that will just be a tiny fraction of the amount of CO2 as compared to that behemoth.

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RunAmuck

04/20/10 at 5:53 pm

Dude I'm coming to your house with some beer, hot dogs, and a few broken plastic things to add. Will party like its 1999!

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old-scratch

04/20/10 at 6:56 pm

Yeah! So why dont you turn off your computers too?. ..

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CoolHand032

04/20/10 at 7:13 pm

Hah I thought the same thing old-scratch. Thought it'd be something like Earth Hour when they'd shut it down for it. Although, this is actually really cool. They say it's open to anyone, is there a fee associated? I'm wondering how they fund this operation.

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QIII

04/21/10 at 12:14 am

It doesn't run Windows...

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stiuengleza

04/21/10 at 8:05 am

De ce nu infiinteaza NASA propria banca!?!? Servere de tranzactii are.
Asa isi va putea finanta orice proiect doreste.

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caramel_center

04/21/10 at 9:20 am

Wow! I bet it runs Windows 7 64-bits. Imagine the user experience of running Powerpoint with all that power. Those scientists must be really happy that their PP presentations are running super-fast. You could probably run two excels at once AND have aero running! That must be useful for all the weather prediction stuff the weather-guys do.

I'm surprised at the shoddiness of the journalism. The article doesn't mention how many usb ports the computer has. That's so unfair that you buy a $300 computer and then have to fork out even more cash for a usb hub.

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