Athena Becomes NASA’s Fastest Supercomputer With 20 Quadrillion Calculations Per Second

NASA has taken the wraps off Athena, the space agency's most potent supercomputer yet. It'll be tasked with things like aircraft and spacecraft modeling, rocket launch simulations, large-scale AI training, etc.

Housed at NASA’s Modular Supercomputing Facility (within Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley) and just brought fully online this week, Athena has become the agency’s most powerful and energy-efficient computing resource to date, delivering over 20 petaflops of peak performance. Its 20 quadrillion calculations per second surpasses the capabilities of its venerable predecessors, Aitken and Pleiades. Built by Hewlett Packard, the system utilizes 1,024 nodes, each equipped with two 128-core AMD EPYC processors (no word if it's the fourth-gen EPYC Bergamo or the newer fith-gen EPYC Turin).

The activation of Athena is also crucial as NASA prepares for the historic Artemis II mission, the first crewed journey to the lunar vicinity in over ...