Pleiades (supercomputer) - Role at NASA

Role At NASA

Pleiades is part of NASA’s High-End Computing Capability (HECC) Project and represents NASA’s state-of-the-art technology for meeting the agency’s supercomputing requirements, enabling NASA scientists and engineers to conduct high-fidelity modeling and simulation for NASA missions in Earth studies, space science, aeronautics research, as well as human and robotic space exploration.

Some of the scientific and engineering projects run on Pleiades include:

• The Kepler Mission, a space observatory launched in March 2009 to locate Earth-like planets, monitors a section of space containing more than 200,000 stars and takes high-resolution images every 30 minutes. After the operations center gathers this data, it is pipelined to Pleiades in order to calculate the size, orbit, and location of the planets surrounding these stars. As of February 2012, the Kepler mission has discovered 1,235 planets, 5 of which are approximately Earth-sized and orbit within the "habitable zone" where water can exist in all three forms (solid, liquid, gas).

• Research and development of next generation space launch vehicles is done on Pleiades using cutting-edge analysis tools and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling and simulation in order to create more efficient and affordable space launch system and vehicle designs. Research has also been done on reducing noise created by the landing gear of aircraft using CDF code application to detect where the sources of noise are within the structures.

• Astrophysics research into the formation of galaxies is run on Pleiades to create simulations of how our own Milky Way Galaxy was formed and what forces might have caused it to form in its signature disk-shape. Pleiades has also been the supercomputing resource for dark matter research and simulation, helping to discover gravitationally bound “clumps” of dark matter within galaxies in one of the largest simulations ever done, in terms of particle numbers.

• Visualization of the Earth's ocean currents using a NASA-built data synthesis model for the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) Project between MIT and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. According to NASA, the "ECCO model-data syntheses are being used to quantify the ocean’s role in the global carbon cycle, to understand the recent evolution of the polar oceans, to monitor time-evolving heat, water, and chemical exchanges within and between different components of the Earth system, and for many other science applications."