NASA will use a new supercomputer built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. to support its goal of returning humans to the moon by 2024.

The system, named “Aitken” after celebrated astronomer Robert Grant Aitken, was detailed by HPE on Thursday. It’s based on the company’s SGI 8600 supercomputer module and has a peak performance of 3.69 petaflops. That equals 3.69 quadrillion calculations per second using floating-point values, a data type used to represent large numbers.

Under the hood, Aitken is made up of 11,50 servers with 46,080 processing cores between them that are linked together by networking gear from Mellanox Technologies Ltd. The nodes run on the second-generation Xeon Scalable processors that Intel Corp. debuted in April. 

Aitken is supported by what HPE described as a specialized liquid cooling system that will help reduce NASA’s energy and water requirements. According to the company, the system uses air from the atmosphere in conjunction with unspecified “evaporative methods” to save millions of gallons of water.

NASA will house Aitken at a newly inaugurated data center attached to its Ames research lab in Silicon Valley. The machine takes up just one of the up to 16 planned supercomputing wings that will make up the facility, which means the center could eventually provide more than 59.9 petaflops of computing power for scientists. The fact HPE supplied the data center’s first machine should put in a good position to land future hardware deals with Ames.

NASA’s scientists will use Aitken to run simulations of spacecrafts’ entry, descent, and landing process. One of the projects that the machine will support is the agency’s ambitious Artemis program, which has the goal of putting astronauts on the lunar South Pole region by 2024.

“HPE has a longstanding collaboration with NASA Ames, and together, we continue to build innovative HPC technologies to fuel space and science discovery that increase overall efficiency and reduce costs,” Bill Mannel, HPE’s vice president of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, said in a statement.

High-performance computing is a bigger priority for the company than ever. Three months ago, HPE inked a $1.3 billion deal to buy supercomputer maker Cray Inc. in what represented a 17% premium to the firm’s stock price at the time. Cray is currently constructing three exascale supercomputers for the U.S. Department of Energy that will each provide hundreds of times more processing power than Aitken. 

Photo: NASA