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NASA To Get 10,240 Node Itanium 2 Linux Cluster

Posted by Hemos on from the building-it-better-safer-and-faster dept.

starwindsurfer writes "US space agency Nasa is to get a massive supercomputing boost to help get its shuttle missions back in action after the 2003 shuttle disaster. Project Columbia, a collaboration with two technology giants, will mean Nasa's computing power will be ramped up by 10 times to do complex simulations."

3 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Tax payer. by BrookHarty · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm rather mad at this idea, the system costs more than an opteron system, costs more to run (heat/power) and is slower. But it at least runs linux.

    Also, why is the BBC the first news tidbit about NASA's new supercomputer?

  2. Re:Irony emulator by kenaaker · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I worked on the space shuttle simulator (lo, these many years ago), and the shuttle computers are derivatives of the computers that IBM originally used in the B52's. They were called AP-101's, and if I remember correctly were Harvard Architecture systems with a separate instruction and data store memories. I think they had 128K (32 bit?) words for instructions and 64K (16 bit?)words for data.

    The simulator originally ran on IBM System 360 mod 75's (serial numbers 1, 4, and 5). When I was working on it, the simulator was running on a IBM 3033 (370 architecture) machine running MVS, and had a hardware interface that attached 3 AP101's to the system IO channels. The shuttle hardware outside of the AP101's and environment were modelled in the 3033, even including the "slosh dynamics" of the fuel in the external tank. The simulator was written in 370 Assembler with macros for the programming control structures.

    One of the funniest things about running the simulator came out of the major failure tests. The simulator had a distinct "abend" that indicated that the vehicle had a position that was below the surface of the earth.

  3. NASA continues to miss the point by Hugh-know-who · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Columbia disaster was not due to a lack of computing power, but rather to a culture of denial. The failure of mid-level and senior management to listen to their people prevented any action being taken until it was too late. In a way, this mirrors the broader American culture of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, typified by a complete refusal of individuals - particularly but not exclusively individuals in powerful positions - to take responsibility for their own actions, inactions or failures of any kind.