en.Wedoany.com Reported - The ASRC Federal team has completed the development and deployment of NASA's latest supercomputer, Athena, a high-performance computing (HPC) system designed to help the agency tackle complex challenges in space and science.
Located at NASA Ames Research Center, Athena will provide computing support for the agency's scientists, engineers, and researchers while reducing operational costs and improving energy efficiency. NASA Ames Research Center is responsible for developing key technologies that underpin NASA's missions. According to NASA, Athena will deliver the computing power needed to simulate rocket launches, design next-generation aircraft and spacecraft, train large-scale artificial intelligence foundation models, and analyze massive datasets to uncover new scientific insights.
Eric Velte, Chief Technology Officer at ASRC Federal, stated that the team collaborated with the customer to realize the vision for this transformative platform, focusing on balancing system stability, user adoption, and performance optimization while minimizing disruptions to ongoing scientific workloads.
Athena surpasses its predecessors—Aitken, Electra, and Pleiades—in performance and efficiency, delivering over 20 petaflops of peak performance while reducing the agency's supercomputing utility costs. The four-rack system contains 1,024 nodes, providing 262,144 CPU cores—equivalent to the total core count of 16,000 to 22,000 modern laptops. Athena currently ranks 116th on the TOP500 list, which ranks high-performance computing systems worldwide used for advanced scientific and engineering applications. Named after the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare, the system was chosen through a contest held last year among NASA's high-end computing capability staff, as she is the half-sister of Artemis, NASA's lunar exploration program.
Completing the system's design, integration testing, and deployment phases required extensive planning, coordination, and technological innovation, relying on collaboration among multiple organizations, including infrastructure, applications, cybersecurity, operations, and vendor partners. ASRC Federal is also responsible for providing round-the-clock, year-round operational support for the Athena HPC.
