Skip to main content

NASA’s Supercomputer Gets 14% Faster

NASA’s Supercomputer Gets 14% Faster


NASA’s super smart computer Pleiades just became a whole lot more powerful. In order to keep up with the demands of scientists and engineers working for NASA, the computer’s performance was enhanced by 14% earlier this month.

In a news release on NASA’s website, it states the computer can now complete “1.24 petaflops — or a quadrillion calculations per second.”




 “To put this enormous number into perspective, if everyone in the world did one calculation per second for eight hours a day, it would take about 370 days to complete what this supercomputer can calculate in 60 seconds,” the release says.

The computer is one of the smartest supercomputers in the world. It is used by 1,200 NASA researchers for a variety of projects, including processing large amounts of star data captured by the Kepler spacecraft and researching how solar flares impact technology on earth.

Pleiades was also used “for generating the ‘Bolshoi’ cosmological simulation — the largest simulation of its kind to date — to help explain how galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe have evolved over billions of years.”

Pleiades is located at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., just 40 miles south of San Francisco. It was installed in 2008 and since that time has received eight major upgrades.

The Pleiades is also the name of a star cluster in the constellation Taurus also referred to as the Seven Sisters and M45.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Google finds 9,500 new malicious websites per day

Google finds 9,500 new malicious websites per day The number of sites that distribute malware is increasing rapidly. Google's robots crawl pages and responsible for maintaining the search index updated 9500 discover new malicious websites per day. The announcement was made in online security blog Google celebrating five years of the campaign Safe Browsing, which aims to protect users from dangerous Web sites.  A member of the Google Security Team, Niels Provos, stresses that the technology that identifies dangerous sites is present not only in the search engine results, but also in popular browsers, like Chrome, Firefox and Safari, protecting about 600 million users worldwide. The Google browser also has a security alert for downloads, which is displayed 300,000 times a day for unsuspecting users.  With the help of robots, the company found 9,500 new malicious websites. Remember, however, that this number includes both sites that are specifically designed to attack...

Bringing Technologies To Mobile Applications

Bringing Technologies To Mobile Applications Editor’s note:  GD (Ram) Ramkumar is a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist. He was founder and CTO of SnapTell (acquired by Amazon in 2009) and is now the Founder and CEO of Concept.io, a new mobile startup. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford. I started as a mobile entrepreneur in the pre-iPhone era in 2006 as the founder of SnapTell, the first successful mobile app in the image recognition space. SnapTell was acquired by Amazon’s subsidiary A9 in 2009. In 2011, I left Amazon to join Charles River Ventures to start a new company, Concept.io, which launches later this year. I reflected on lessons learned before embarking on the new venture and wanted to share them with the community. This article shares lessons I learned and discusses mobile trends that have emerged since. The Key Lesson: Choose a problem and frame it well Our first product at SnapTell was a service that allowed consumers to send in a photo of ...

Facebook has acquired Face.com

Facebook has acquired Face.com for an undisclosed amount, the Israeli start up announced Monday. The terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed. Face.com powers facial recognition software that third-party developers can incorporate freely into their own apps. It also has two Facebook apps of its own: Photo Finder, which helps people find untagged pictures of themselves as well as their friends, and Photo Tagger, which helps people quickly assign tags to group photos. In a post on Face.com’s corporate blog, CEO Gil Hirsch indicated that he and his team would be focused on building out Facebook’s mobile products. “Like our friends at Facebook, we think that mobile is a critical part of people’s lives as they both create and consume content, and share content with their social graph. By working with Facebook directly, and joining their team, we’ll have more opportunities to build amazing products that will be employed by consumers -– that’s all we’ve ever wanted to do,” ...