NASA works with the world's leading technologies and makes discoveries that are important for humanity. However, according to a special report from the NASA Office of Inspector General, NASA supercomputers are outdated and insufficient to perform assigned tasks, which leads to mission delays. NASA supercomputers still rely primarily on CPUs.
NASA currently has five high-end computing systems located at the Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility in Ames, California, and the NASA Climate Simulation Center (NCCS) in Goddard, Maryland. The list includes computers Aitken (13.12 PFLOPS, designed to support the Artemis lunar program), Electra (8.32 PFLOPS), Discover (8.1 PFLOPS, used for climate and weather modeling), Pleiades (7.09 PFLOPS, for climate modeling, astrophysics research and aerospace modeling), and Endeavor (154.8 TFLOPS).
These machines use legacy processor cores almost entirely. For example, all NAS supercomputers use over 18,000 processors and only 48 graphics cards, and NCSS uses even fewer GPUs.
“Officials have expressed numerous concerns about this observation, saying that NASA's failure to modernize systems can be attributed to various factors, such as supply chain issues, modern computing language (coding) requirements, and a lack of qualified personnel needed to implement new technologies. Ultimately, failure to upgrade HEC's current infrastructure will directly impact the Agency's ability to achieve its intelligence, science, and research objectives,” the report said.
The audit, conducted by NASA's Office of Inspector General, also found that the agency's computing operations are not centrally managed, resulting in inefficiencies and a lack of a coherent strategy for using local versus cloud computing resources.
Uncertainty has led to fluctuations in the use of cloud resources due to unknown scheduling practices or perceived higher costs. Some missions are resorting to acquiring their infrastructure to avoid waiting for access to core supercomputing resources, which are largely overloaded because they do not rely on the latest technology.
Additionally, the audit found that security controls for computing infrastructure are often bypassed or not implemented, increasing the risk of cyberattacks. The report states that the transition to GPUs and code modernization is important to meet NASA's current and future needs. GPUs offer significantly higher computing capabilities for workloads that involve parallel processing, which is very common in scientific modeling.
Source: Tom's Hardware
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