NASA Launches New Supercomputer in Silicon Valley

<p>NASA has launched its newest supercomputer&comma; Athena&comma; an advanced system designed to support a new generation of missions and research projects right in Silicon Valley&period; The newest member of the agency’s High-End Computing Capability project expands the resources available to help scientists and engineers tackle some of the most complex challenges in space&comma; aeronautics&comma; and science&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Housed in the agency’s Modular Supercomputing Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View&comma; Athena delivers more computing power than any other NASA system&comma; surpassing the capabilities of its predecessors&comma; Aitken and Pleiades&comma; in power and efficiency&period; The new system&comma; which was rolled out in January to existing users after a beta testing period&comma; delivers over 20 petaflops of peak performance – a measurement of the number of calculations it can make per second – while reducing the agency’s supercomputing utility costs&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;Exploration has always driven NASA to the edge of what’s computationally possible&comma;” said Kevin Murphy&comma; chief science data officer and lead for the agency’s High-End Computing Capability portfolio at NASA Headquarters in Washington&period; &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;Now with Athena&comma; NASA will expand its efforts to provide tailored computing resources that meet the evolving needs of its missions&period;”<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Athena is configured as follows&colon;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<h4>AMD Turin-Based Compute Resources<&sol;h4>&NewLine;<ul>&NewLine;<li>4 racks<&sol;li>&NewLine;<li>1&comma;024 Turin nodes<&sol;li>&NewLine;<li>262&comma;144 cores<&sol;li>&NewLine;<li>786 terabytes &lpar;TB&rpar; total memory<&sol;li>&NewLine;<li>20&period;132 petaflops &lpar;PF&rpar; theoretical peak performance<&sol;li>&NewLine;<&sol;ul>&NewLine;<p>Supercomputers like Athena are critical to missions and research across the agency&comma; providing the computational power necessary to simulate rocket launches&comma; design next-generation aircraft&comma; and train large-scale artificial intelligence foundation models capable of analyzing massive datasets to uncover new scientific insights&period; The supercomputer is available to NASA researchers and external scientist and researchers supporting NASA programs who can apply for time to use the system&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>The name Athena was selected through a contest held in March 2025 among the agency’s High-End Computing Capability workforce&comma; which chose the name of the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare because she is the half-sister of <a href&equals;"https&colon;&sol;&sol;www&period;nasa&period;gov&sol;feature&sol;artemis&sol;">Artemis<&sol;a>&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Managed by NASA’s <a href&equals;"https&colon;&sol;&sol;science&period;nasa&period;gov&sol;about-us&sol;ocsdo&sol;" rel&equals;"noopener">Office of the Chief Science Data Officer<&sol;a>&comma; the High-End Computing Capability portfolio supports a flexible&comma; hybrid computing approach that combines supercomputers with access to other tools&comma; such as commercial cloud platforms&period; This strategy enables NASA teams to choose the most effective computing environment for their research&comma; whether running complex simulations&comma; developing and deploying AI models&comma; or performing large-scale data analysis&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>The project’s capabilities will continue to expand as the agency invests in advanced supercomputing to meet the growing complexity of its missions&period; As exploration pushes further into the universe&comma; the ability to compute quickly&comma; efficiently&comma; and intelligently will be more important than ever&period; With Athena&comma; NASA is laying the digital foundation for the next era of discovery&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;