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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has brought its new flagship supercomputer, Athena, online at the Modular Supercomputing Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. This move has significantly expanded the agency’s high-end computing capacity for science and exploration missions.
Athena delivers 20.13 petaflops of peak computing power, nearly tripling the capability of Pleiades, the 7.09-petaflop system it replaces. Pleiades was decommissioned earlier this month after more than a decade of service supporting NASA missions.
The new system forms part of NASA’s High-End Computing Capability project, which underpins research ranging from climate modelling and astrophysics to aeronautics and mission design.
Athena is a CPU-based system made up of 1,024 nodes powered by AMD EPYC Turin processors, paired with 786TB of system memory. NASA said the system will be accessible not only to its internal researchers but also to external scientists supporting NASA programs, who can apply for computing time.
“Exploration has always driven NASA to the edge of what’s computationally possible,” said Kevin Murphy, NASA’s chief science data officer, adding that Athena will help deliver computing resources tailored to evolving mission needs.
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Athena joins a broader portfolio of NASA supercomputers, including Cabeus, Aitken, Electra, Discover, and Endeavour.
NASA upgraded Cabeus in March 2025 by installing 350 Nvidia GH200 nodes, which increased system capacity by 13 petaflops.
NASA’s Office of Inspector General 2024 report showed that NASA's high-end computing resources continue to experience oversubscription problems because they depend too much on central processing units, which restrict their ability to handle new computing tasks.
The report recommended leadership changes for NASA to achieve better alignment between its computing infrastructure and its specific mission requirements.
