The CSC HPC CoE has been performing a supporting role in preparing Nebula, a Cloud Computing pilot program under development at NASA Ames Research Center, for production. Nebula is currently being used by NASA for education and public outreach, for collaboration and public input, and also for mission support. The primary data center for Nebula is at the Ames Research Center located at Moffett Field, California, which is a customer site for CSC-delivered HPC support and services.
CSC's HPC CoE team has implemented an expansion to the Alabama Supercomputer Authority's DMC (Dense Memory Cluster) supercomputer system. This expansion adds an additional 96 nodes, each with 8 processor cores and 24 GB of memory. The processors are the new Intel Nehalem chips (5500 series Xeon) running at 2.26 GHz. These processors have some architectural improvements that give them significantly better performance than previous processors of similar clock speeds. This expands the DMC from 488 processor cores to a total of 1256 processor cores. Alabama Supercomputer Authority is located in Huntsville, Alabama.
The CSC HPC CoE will assist General Atomics in the implementation and operation of a Storage Lifecycle Management (SLM) federation across six of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program's Supercomputing Resource Center sites. This effort will include the use of commercially-supported SLM software combining Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) to support data file management and archival requirements. Contract value for this effort is $22.5 million over ten years.
Successful gains in computational capacity and capability continue to support NCCS's expanding vision of supporting climate simulation studies. In August 2009, the fifth in a series of Scalable Compute Unit upgrades was accomplished. The CSC HPC CoE team played key roles throughout the procurement, site preparation, and system integration processes, to bring the expanded High-End Computing system into service. The NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is located at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The HPC CoE partnered with NASA Ames to evaluate, down-select, and integrate a storage solution that reduced ten (10) silos down to just two (2), yet increasing overall storage capacity to 32 petabytes while freeing up approximately 1400 square feet of prime HPC/Data Center floor space. Such innovative solutions can provide significant energy, cooling and floor space relief for aging facilities. NASA Ames is located at Moffett Field, California.
NASA Ames has set sights high to provide its scientists and researchers with petaFLOP computing capability, and the CSC HPC CoE is there to support in the mission. NASA Ames is located at Moffett Field, California.
