Pleiades (supercomputer)
Pleiades () is a petascale supercomputer housed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center located at Moffett Field near Mountain View, California. It is maintained by NASA and partners Hewlett Packard Enterprise (formerly Silicon Graphics International) and Intel. As of November 2019 it is ranked the 32nd most powerful computer on the TOP500 list with a LINPACK rating of 5.95 petaflops (5.95 quadrillion floating point operations per second) and a peak performance of 7.09 petaflops from its most recent hardware upgrade. The system serves as NASA's largest supercomputing resource, supporting missions in aeronautics, human spaceflight, astrophysics, and Earth science. History Built in 2008 and named for the Pleiades open star cluster, the supercomputer debuted as the third most powerful supercomputer in the world at 487 teraflops. It originally contained 100 SGI Altix ICE 8200EX racks with 12,800 Intel Xeon quad-core E5472 Harpertown processors connected with more than 20 miles of InfiniBand double data rate (DDR) cabling. With the addition of ten more racks of quad-core X5570 Nehalem processors in 2009, Pleiades ranked sixth on the November 2009 TOP500 with 14,080 processors running at 544 teraflops. In January 2010, the scientists and engineers at NAS successfully