NASA announced the availability of Athena, its most powerful and efficient supercomputer to date. The agency installed the system at its Modular Supercomputing Facility at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
The agency said Athena can finish in one-day tasks that would take a typical PC about 500 years. NASA plans to use that speed for mission simulations, science workloads, and AI development.
NASA said Athena delivers over 20 petaflops of peak performance. One petaflop equals one quadrillion calculations per second. NASA rolled Athena out in January after a beta testing period with existing users. The agency said the system also reduces supercomputing utility costs.
NASA described Athena as the newest member of its High-End Computing Capability (HECC) project. The agency said it surpasses older systems, including Aitken and Pleiades, in power and efficiency.
NASA’s supercomputing group published configuration details for the cluster. It listed 1,024 nodes, 262,144 cores, 786 terabytes of memory, and 20.132 petaflops of theoretical peak performance.
NASA said supercomputers like Athena help teams simulate rocket launches and other complex scenarios. Those runs can reduce risk before teams build or fly hardware.
The agency linked Athena’s role to the Artemis program, which targets crewed missions around the Moon. NASA said the system’s name reflects Greek mythology and its relationship to Artemis.
Athena will support engineering work that needs repeated “what if” testing. Those studies can include spacecraft systems behavior under extreme conditions and navigation-relevant modeling.
NASA said the system also supports aircraft design research, including next-generation aircraft concepts. That work fits NASA’s broader aeronautics portfolio that relies on large simulations.
Kevin Murphy, NASA Chief Science Data Officer, said the agency built Athena for growing mission demands. “Exploration has always driven NASA to the edge of what’s computationally possible,” Murphy said at NASA Headquarters.
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NASA said Athena will support research across space, aeronautics, and science. The agency also highlighted Earth science workloads that depend on high-end computing. Climate modeling and weather-pattern analysis often require many runs and large datasets. NASA said Athena can help scientists process massive datasets and uncover new scientific insights.
Athena also supports large-scale artificial intelligence foundation models, NASA said. Those models can analyze massive datasets to find patterns faster than manual workflows.
In addition, NASA said the supercomputer is available to NASA researchers and external scientists supporting NASA programs. Users can apply for time on the system.
NASA said its Office of the Chief Science Data Officer manages the HECC portfolio. The office supports a hybrid computing approach that combines supercomputers with tools like commercial cloud platforms.
Furthermore, NASA said it will keep expanding the portfolio’s capabilities as it invests in advanced supercomputing. The agency described Athena as part of the computing base for future missions and research.