Intel blasts into space

CHIPZILLA IS TEAMING UP with NASA in order to beef up the space agency's computing power.

Together with server and storage specialist SGI, the triumvirate, which will be snappily named the Space Act Agreement, will put together new kit at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Project Pleiades will develop a computational system with a capacity of one Petaflop peak performance (1,000 trillion operations per second) by 2009 and a system with a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10,000 trillion operations per second) by 2012.

"Achieving such a monumental increase in performance will help fulfill NASA's increasing need for additional computing capacity and will enable us to provide the computational performance and capacity needed for future missions," said project Director Pete Worden. "This additional computational performance is necessary to help us achieve breakthrough scientific discoveries."

This is the first big upgrade to NASA's computing oomph since the deployment of Columbia in 2004. That represented a tenfold increase in the agency's modelling and simulation power.

The forthcoming ramp-up will increase that existing power by a factor of 16. µ

L'Inq
NASA