National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Blinky lights all aglow inside the Discover supercomputer.

In a recent post I introduced you to the supercomputer down the hall — seriously, it’s right down the hall from my office and down one flight of stairs. The machine is called Discover, and scientists at Goddard’s NASA Center for Climate Simulation use it to study climate change, weather, and other basic questions about our planet.

Discover’s component parts are spread across several rooms, connected by a high-speed data network. People can network into the system from across Goddard’s campus or the country via data superhighways. In recent weeks, Discover has turned into a construction site. The upgrade now underway will double the system’s computing capacity.

Here’s a quick tour of the project and a refresher on what a supercomputer looks like and how it works.



This is what Discover looks like: metal cabinets, called racks, full of shallow rectangular devices called nodes. Think of a node as the equivalent of a souped-up desktop computer. The heart of each node is a processor, or “core.” (The MacBook Pro laptop I wrote this blog on contains an Intel Core 2 Duo chip with two cores.) The four rows of 18 cabinets, or “racks,” above contain 8,256 cores, or roughly 4,000 times the processing capability of my laptop. Another room contains an additional 32 racks. These two rooms, with 50 racks of processing nodes, comprise the current Discover “cluster,” with a total of 14,968  cores.



This is “Scalable Unit 7,” the newest addition to the Discover cluster. These 18 racks contain 14,400 cores — roughly the same capacity of the 50 preexisting racks of equipment. The reason is that chip manufacturers can now put more processors on the same slab of silicon. Again, back to my MacBook Pro: its chip contains two cores. Older chips in Discover contain up to four cores. Scalable Unit 7 contains nodes with Intel Xeon Westmere processors, which contain SIX cores per chip. The bottom line is you can pack more computing power in the same space. The upgrade will nearly double Discover’s capacity to 29,368 cores, with a peak speed of 320 trillion calculations per second.



Here are the backs of the racks. You can see the nodes, connected by wire and fiber optics. Cooling fans inside the nodes blow hot air toward the backs of the cabinets. Special refrigerated cooling doors will absorb that heat and remove it using Goddard’s chilled water AC system.



That big cable snake will connect Scalable Unit 7 to the rest of the supercomputer. The final incarnation of Discover, with nearly 30,000 cores, will require more than 5 miles of copper wire cable and 6 miles of fiber optics to connect all the components of the system. That includes 12 petabytes of mass data storage capacity, or the equivalent of 3.2 billion iTunes song downloads.

Right now, the installation is still underway. The NCCS computer technologists and researchers will put the new and improved Discover through its paces over the coming months and have it running at full capacity by the end of the year.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

Click to view computer simulation of August 2005, during a record-breaking hurricane season.


Scientists at Goddard’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) hope that supercomputer simulations of the global weather machine will eventually pay off with forecasts helpful in planning for hurricanes.

Since the notorious 2005 hurricane season that included Hurricane Katrina, “there have been tremendous advances in high-resolution modeling of storms,” according to GMAO scientist Siegfried Schubert.

Schubert says that researchers have reached new heights in detailed weather and climate simulation using Goddard’s Discover supercomputer. The star of the show is the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5).

GEOS-5 combines theoretical simulation of Earth’s coupled ocean-atmosphere system and real data from Goddard’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites. Clouds form and billow; storms evolve from moisture and heat; hurricanes scud across ocean basins.

In a recent record for lifelike computer simulation of Earth’s storm factory, GEOS-5 reproduced details as small as 14 kilometers (about 9 miles). That’s a smaller footprint than many thunderstorms.

The model was able to simulate important structures of hurricanes, such as the sharply defined inner “eye wall” and clusters of convective clouds that are part of the storm’s plumbing system.

GMAO researcher William Putman re-ran the 2005 tropical storm seasons using GEOS-5, an exercise known as “hindcasting.” The sea surface temperature drove, or “forced,” the process, just as in real life.

The GEOS-5 model roughly reproduced the actual number of tropical storms in 2005. That year, the Atlantic basin spawned 28 tropical storms, 15 hurricanes, and 7 “major” hurricanes (Category 3 or higher).

What does this mean for you and me?

With continuing advances in both the power of supercomputers and more accurate models, the heirs to GEOS-5 should be able to produce decent seasonal forecasts. This means predicting how many storms will form, how many could be major storms.

Further on, models that account for large-scale patterns of circulation in the ocean and atmosphere could even help forecast the number of landfalling storms.

With such a forecasts, regions would at least have the option of preparing more effectively.



Check out the special feature on Katrina on the NASA website.

Watch, “Katrina Retrospective: 5 years After the Storm” below for a fascinating exploration of Hurricane Katrina from the perspective of NASA’s fleet of satellites:



_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

gamma blitz

MONDAY JULY 19: A year ago, something hit Jupiter, the Hubble Space Telescope saw it, and Goddard scientists were part of the response.

SPRECHEN SIE GAMMA BLITZ? The website for the German magazine Der Spiegel has produced a cool video — it’s (duh) in German, by the way — about last week’s breaking news about a gamma-ray burst (GRB) that temporarily “blinded” the Swift observatory. In German, a GRB is called a “gamma blitz.” (Yup, they make you first watch a commercial, in German, before the gamma-ray blitz starts.)

AWESOME STATISTIC: The NASA Blueshift Weekly Awesomeness Round-up takes the prize this week for most blogolicious science statistic. NASA scientists helped discovered a black hole with massive jets blasting from its poles. “If the black hole were shrunk to the size of a soccer ball,” scientist Robert Scoria explained, “each jet would extend from the Earth to beyond the orbit of Pluto.”


TUESDAY JULY 20: Today in 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 Lander touched down safely on the surface of Mars. Also, a NASA mission called “Apollo 11″ landed two guys on the moons, whereupon one of them, named Neil Armstrong, went outside to take a giant leap for mankind. . . . The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Facebook page did a lusciously detailed and dramatic series of posts reenacting the mission.

UP FROM THE DEPTHS: The central peak of Aristarchus Crater on the moon has deep origins. Read about it on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LROC) Featured Image website.

SLICK OPERATIONS: See the NASA satellite time-lapse video of the Gulf oil spill through July 14, 2010.


HOW HIGH THE FOREST? The NASA Earth Science News Team’s Adam Voiland features a first-of-its kind map of the height of the world’s forests — based on data collected by NASA’s ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites.

star power

WEDNESDAY JULY 21: NASA-funded researcher Bo-wen Shen re-runs the formation of the Tropical Cyclone Nargis in a supercomputer. COOL SHIPS: On the What On Earth blog, NASA Earth Science News Team reporter Gretchen Cook-Anderson profiles NASA/Goddard scientist Charles Kironji, who discovered that the wakes of ocean-going ships have a local chilling effect on climate. ATTRACTIVE: Sparkley loopy new shot of our supermagnetic home star from the Solar Dynamics Observatory uploads to the Goddard Flickr site.

booted out

THURSDAY JULY 22: Today in 1962, NASA launched the ill-fated Mariner 1 spacecraft bound for Venus. The vehicle was destroyed by the Range Safety Officer 293 seconds after launch when it veered off course.

GIRLS IN SPACE: Ten Girl Scout teams nationwide, including two girls from Kansas, spent the week at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland as part of a NASA’s “Girls in Space” program. . . . This evening, members of the Goddard Astronomy Club held a special star party for the Scouts at the Visitor Center, featuring the moon, Venus, Saturn, and summer constellations.

COSMIC COOKERY: A new video explains how a powerful instrument called a mass spectrometer figures out the recipe of the universe.

FROZEN FLOW: NASA Earth Science News Team writer Kathryn Hansen reports on the Antarctic Surface Accumulation and Ice Discharge (ASAID) project. The project is making a new map of the “grounding line” where ice breaks off into the ocean.

AND STAY OUT! NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected two stars being tossed out of the Milky Way Galaxy.

FRIDAY JULY 23: The historic Landsat 1 satellite launched this day in 1972. Images from Landsat 1 demonstrated the usefulness of remote sensing data for land surveys, land management, water resource planning, agricultural forecasting, forest management, sea ice movement, and cartography.

HOT LINKS: The University of Virginia Engineering Department’s E-News Online for July profiles Alexandra Hoeft (Engr Sci, Math’11), a spring 2010 intern with NASA Undergraduate Student Research Program (USRP). Hoeft worked for 15 weeks at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with NASA mentor Stephen Waterbury. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

SUNDAY JULY 4: On this day in 1997, the inexpensive Mars Pathfinder (costing only $267 million) bounced on its air bags to the surface of the Red Planet.


MONDAY JULY 5: While the rest of us were on a federal holiday, seeking shelter from the brain-melting heat wave, the NASA Blueshift team posts their Weekly Awesomeness Roundup, with blogolicious multimedia tidbits from NASA, astronomy, and science at large. . . . GOGBLOG’S FAVE: How do 7th graders sketch/describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab? Is it: “Mommy, I’m afraid, can we go home now?” Find out the surprising answer for yourself!



TUESDAY JULY 6: NASA fires off a special Hubble Space Telescope image of star cluster NGC 3603 reminiscent of a July 4 fireworks air burst. Thanks, Wide Field Camera 3 — an instrument developed jointly by the Hubble program at Goddard Space Flight Center, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation

KEEPIN’ IT GREEN: At an event hosted by the Green Building Council, the Maryland Department of Environment presents Goddard Space Flight Center with a Maryland Green Registry Leadership Award for continuing efforts to reduce GSFC’s environmental footprint — including reducing the amount of waste it produces by 25 percent.

GOOD DAY SUNSHINE: The SDOMission2009 YouTube channel posts a new video, Seeing A Star In A New Light, highlighting the head-explodingly cool images of the sun captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

WEDNESDAY JULY 7: A web feature by NASA Earth Science News Team reporter Patrick Lynch details the upcoming field campaign by NASA aircraft and satellites to study hurricanes: the Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) mission. Goddard researchers Scott Braun and Gerry Heymsfield and other members of the GRiP science team will use the new data to figure out what spins up killer storms.

THURSDAY JULY 8: What on Earth spotlights other NASA bloggers who cover earth science, including {ahem} gogblog . . . . READY FOR TAKE-OFF: Today’s featured post: Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Tony Freeman writes on the Big Fat Planet blog about NASA’s aerial armada of research aircraft. . . . NASA: spaceships, airships, and more.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team posts its featured image — a snapshot of the Apollo 16 landing site lit by a high-noon sun. . . . TAKE THAT, FAKE MOON LANDING CONSPIRACISTS: Shining brightly are the package of scientific instruments that astronauts left at the site as well as the radioisotope-powered electric generator that powered them for years after we left the moon.

TEMPLE VIEW: NASA Blueshift blogger Maggie Masetti recalls her trip to ancient ruins at Mexico’s Chichen Itza and the lunar eclipse she witnessed there.


FRIDAY JULY 9: Bright-eyed and bushy tailed Goddard sun scientists Alex Young and Holly Gilbert give press interviews starting at {{shudder}} 6:00 a.m. to preview the July 11 total solar eclipse. Here is Holly being interviewed on a Tampa TV show. . . . and this clip of Alex talking about the eclipse. (Sorry, in both cases, you will have to watch a short commercial message first.)

HOW’S THE VIEW? The June 2010 Goddard View is available, with the NASA Center for Climate Simulation Discover supercomputer gracing the cover.

ITS A BIRD, IT’S A PLANE? What On Earth blogger Adam Voiland posts the first-ever What On Earth Is THAT? guess-what-this-image-is recurring contest blog feature thingie. Guess correctly and win a free suborbital Virgin Galactic flight with Paris Hilton. Guess correctly and win the undying admiration of a NASA science blogger.

THE GOLDEN ARCHES: New Solar Dynamics Observatory video shows glowing star stuff arcing along loops in the sun’s magnetic field.

SATURDAY JULY 10: On this day in 1962, Telstar 1 — the first privately funded satellite — was launched. AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories paid the bill.
HOT LINKS-O-THE WEEK: In Outside Goddard, Elizabeth M. Jarrell offers short profiles of current and former Goddard people and the interesting lives they lead outside the gates. When Bob Met Alice profiles “newlyweds Bob Wigand, 85, and Mary Alice, 86, thank Goddard for giving them a common background.

I CAN SEE YOUR BIG FAT PLANET FROM HERE: Don’t miss Goddard’s Flickr album of Earth. Pretty pix and animations of the home planet.

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center.

The Goodyear Aerospace Massively Parallel Processor, at NASA/GSFC sometime in the 1980s.

Did you know that Goddard Space Flight Center occupies a little-known place in the history of computer design?

To find out all the details, read this historical post on the AirSpace blog by Paul Ceruzzi, a curator specializing in aerospace computing and electronics in the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM).

Ceruzzi informs us that the leading Google search on NASM’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport is “a pair of large blue boxes crammed full of circuit boards, tucked away in the northwest corner of the McDonnell Space hangar.”

The blue boxes are the Massively Parallel Processor. Ceruzzi explains in his blog post:

“The MPP was built for the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, by the Goodyear Aerospace Corporation of Akron, Ohio—a division of Goodyear well-known for its lighter-than-air craft, but a company that also was a pioneer in supplying advanced computers to military and aerospace customers. It was designed in the late 1970s, delivered to Goddard in 1983, and operated into the 1990s.”

What did the MPP do? Ok, very simply, a parallel computing machine divides a computing task up into pieces, solves each piece working in parallel, and puts the results all back together in the end. It’s the difference between a single worker with a shovel arduously digging a ditch, or 100 workers attacking the task simultaneously as a group.

This portion of the Discover supercompouting cluster racks up about 90 teraflops of number crunching power.

One of the heir’s to the MPP sits down the hall from me. It is the Discover supercomputer, based on a parallel processing architecture. Soon it will have 29,000 processors working in parallel to solve massive computational tasks for the new NASA Center for Climate Simulation. You can read more about Discover on Gogblog if you want.

I’m hoping to find someone at Goddard who might have worked with the MPP and can tell us more about what they did with it.

It is therefore Gogblog’s good fortune to be located a few doors from Goddard’s Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office.

CISTO friends and colleagues…anybody ever work with the MPP? Email me or post your comments on the blog to share with the public and your NASA colleagues.

Contact Gogblog: daniel[dot]a[dot]pendick[at sign]nasa[dot]gov

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Gogblog tips his massively parallel hat to Federal News Radio’s Christopher Dorobek for including this blog in the “Dorobek Must Reads” list for July 6.

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center.

This portion of the Discover supercomputing cluster racks up about 90 teraflops of number crunching power.

Have you ever seen a supercomputer? Do you know how one works?

I got a chance to look a supercomputer in the face recently, when I took an employee tour of the Discover supercomputer at Goddard Space Flight Center. It’s literally down the hall from me. I just never got a chance to see it up close since I started working here almost a year ago. Discover is the workhorse computing resource for the NASA Center for Climate Simulation.

It’s a pretty impressive gadget. Walking between the metal racks packed with equipment, multicolored blinky lights aglow, I thought of a famous scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The spaceship’s supercomputer, HAL, has gone all homicidal on the crew, so astronaut Dave Bowman climbs into its brain and starts to unplug stuff. Famously, this reduces the paranoid evil genius HAL to the level of a blubbering toddler singing “Daisy.”

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Blogolicious Supercomputer Facts

Goddard Space Flight Center’s Discover supercomputer can perform approximately 159 trillion calculations per second. The supercomputer consists of:

• 14,968 processors
• 12,904 memory modules
• 35,608 gigabytes of random-access memory
• 3,120 hard drives
• 5 miles of copper cables
• 6 miles of fiber-optic cables

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Tubes and wires oh my! The ENIAC supercomputer.

I would bet that if you asked 10 people on the street to draw a supercomputer, they would produce something like HAL’s nerve center — a softly humming, dimly glowing cybercave.

Or, they might sketch something like ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. Eighty feet long and weighing 27 tons, ENIAC contained more than 17,000 vacuum tubes.

To make computers really fast in those days, you had to place their various components close together so the electrical signals wouldn’t have to travel too far. Each “trip” meant a tiny delay. Many, many delays add up to a computing traffic jam.

These days, it’s different. Supercomputers like Discover are essentially collections of many, many  smaller-scale computing devices working in parallel to solve big tasks.

They are not necessarily in the same place, either. Discover’s machinery is spread across several rooms, connected by a high-speed data network. People can network into the system from across the country via data superhighways.

Now I’m going to talk some tech. And I’m going to be disgustingly precise about it. Supercomputer people talk nodes, processors, cores, and teraflops. It’s notoriously confusing, but you have to understand these terms to really get supercomputing. So here we go . . .

The functional unit of Discover is the processor, just like in your desktop PC or laptop (or iPhone or whatever). The processor is a little brain on a silicon chip. It does the number-crunching.

Waaayyyy back in the day — like, before 2005! — the motherboard of your computer sported a single processor on a single chip. If you wanted more processing power, you had to add more chips.

Not anymore. Now the little brain in your computer has multiple Central Processing Units (CPUs), or “cores,” working in parallel. The processor in my Mac Book Pro, for example, contains two cores. It’s an Intel Core 2 Duo. Both cores reside on the same chip, the same little slab of silicon.

So, are you still with me?

The Discover supercomputer uses dual-core and quad-core processors. In other words, each slab of silicon hosts two cores or four cores. For the ubergeeks in the house, the brand name of the latest processor is Intel Xeon Nehalem. (And yes, you can buy personal computers with this processor — the Mac Pro 2.66 GHz workstation, for example.)

Discover uses about 15,000 cores to crunch data. The cores exist within racks and racks of gizmos called nodes.

Each node has two Xeon Nehalem processors, for a total of either four or eight cores. So each node is equivalent to a really, really fast desktop computer, something with twice the horsepower of the aforementioned Mac Pro workstation. Each node has a hard drive for its operating system software as well as network interfaces for moving data in and out.

Blinky lights: one of the high-speed switches that connect Discover's computing nodes.

So what does this all mean? It means that the supercomputer at the heart of climate and weather science at NASA Goddard runs on the same kind of processors found in personal computers — perhaps yours.

The processors work in parallel, like an army of workers digging a canal with shovels. Each processor lifts a shovelful of data at a time, but if you have a lot of shovels, you end up with the Panama Canal.

Of course, the thousands of workers also need life support, like shelter, food, and water. In supercomputing terms, that means electricity and cooling systems to carry waste heat away from the processors.

A lot of clever engineering went into packing Discover into a couple of rooms. For example, the back doors of the equipment racks have heat-sucking radiators built into them. The radiators are hooked up to Goddard’s chilled water system. Having multiple cores on the same chip reduces the hardware required to prevent a cybermeltdown.

Although right now Discover crunches with 15,000 cores, a planned upgrade will bring it to around 29,000. And what does this all buy you? About 160 teraflops of computing power for the moment.

A teraflop is one trillion floating point operations per second. Flops measure the computing horsepower of a system, its ability to crunch numbers. Add two numbers in your head: you have just completed one floating point operation.

So what is 160 teraflops?

Get the entire world population to add two numbers every second for 5 hours and 20 minutes. That’s 160 teraflops!

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center.