NASA, Intel and SGI announced a joint collaboration today which will ultimately result in increasing the space agency's supercomputer performance and capacity.
The project, called Pleiades, will see the development of a computational system with a capacity of one petaflops 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.
It doesn't mean a whole lot to us, but we couldn't help but wonder what such a system could do for our HEXUS Folding@home team.
Unfortunately, we can't see ourselves being allowed to use it as NASA has plans to achieve breakthrough scientific discoveries of its own.
Diane M. Bryant, vice president of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group and general manager or Server Platforms Group, Intel Digital Enterprise Group, said:
"Intel, working with SGI, is proud to play an important role in helping NASA expand the pursuit of scientific discovery. Systems such as Pleiades challenge the imagination, and guide our exploration of Earth, space, and beyond. As we approach performance that was once thought impossible to achieve, our eyes are opened even wider to the vast possibilities enabled by supercomputing."
If you'd like to learn more about NASA's Advanced Supercomputing facility, head on over to the official website: http://www.nas.nasa.gov
