Intel, SGI, and NASA have announced a project that aims to produce a dramatic increase in the space agency's supercomputing capacity.

The "Pleiades" project, using SGI systems based on multicore Intel processors, will deliver a computational system with a capacity of 1 petaflops (10¹⁵ floating point operations per second) by 2009 and then increase that to 10 petaflops by 2012, according to NASA.

That initial milestone would represent a 16× improvement over the agency's current top-dog supercomputer, Columbia (pictured). That 10,240-processor system, based on SGI Altix systems with Intel Itanium 2 processors, offers 88 teraflops of peak performance.

Like Columbia, the systems will reside at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. Applications for the supercomputer will include modelling and simulations for space-vehicle design and climate modelling.

"Achieving such a monumental increase in performance will help fulfills NASA's increasing need for additional computing capacity and will enable us to provide the computational performance and capacity needed for future missions," said S. Pete Worden, director of the NASA Ames Research Center.

By Matthew Miller, Editor-in-Chief, EDN.com - Electronic News