Nasa supercomputer gets rocket power

Nasa is upgrading its supercomputer to cater for an expected surge in workload associated with future missions and scientific research.

The US space agency's Pleiades programme aims to give peak performance of 1,000 trillion operations per second - or one petaflop - by 2009. By 2012, the aim is to have 10 petaflops.

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Working with Intel and supercomputing specialist SGI, the Advanced Supercomputing facility at Nasa's Ames research centre in California will be able to deal with increasingly complex modelling and simulation work.

Ames director, Pete Worden, said the massive performance boost will fulfil Nasa's increasing need for capacity for future missions and scientific research.

Back in July 2007, Nasa signed a supercomputer support deal with Computer Sciences Corporation, potentially worth $597m over 10 years.

Nasa has been operating its Columbia supercomputer since 2004, which at the time represented a tenfold increase in performance. The latest upgrade will boost performance a further 16 times.