ABSTRACT
Since its installation in 2008, the Pleiades supercomputer within the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center has been integral to meeting the science and engineering goals of NASA's missions in space exploration, aeronautics, and science. NASA increasingly relies on computational modeling to achieve and enhance mission success. The advantages of computational analysis and the unique requirements of NASA missions made clear the need to aggressively develop and expand in-house high-end computing (HEC) capabilities. A key strategy for ensuring broad mission impact of the High-End Computing Capability (HECC) project is the continual growth of NASA's supercomputing capability. The compute subsystem of Pleiades consists of the processing nodes, which are the primary resources for executing jobs; front-end nodes, which are used for program and data preparation, launching jobs, and post-processing; and bridge nodes that facilitate file transfers. Pleiades has impacted the supercomputing community through the pathfinding technologies, techniques, and processes developed by NAS and its partners.
