This video documents a tour of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center, led by Scott Manley. It covers the history of supercomputing at NASA, from the ILLIAC IV to the current multi-petaflop Pleiades system. A significant portion details the facility's infrastructure, including its multi-megawatt power consumption, flywheel-based UPS, and a strategic shift toward highly efficient, modular, containerized computing units that use direct water cooling to drastically reduce power overhead. The centerpiece of the presentation is the Hyperwall, a 128-screen, half-billion-pixel visualization system. The video uses the Hyperwall to showcase a detailed case study on solving a critical aerodynamics problem with the Space Launch System (SLS). This case study demonstrates the synergy between physical wind tunnel experiments using unsteady pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) and high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The combined analysis identified and solved a dangerous vibration issue caused by vortex shedding, leading to the addition of strakes on the solid rocket boosters.
Inside NASA's Supercomputing Powerhouse: From Aerodynamics to Astronomy
0:00:06 Facility Overview: The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center specializes in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to simulate and test future aircraft and rockets, identifying design flaws before expensive physical prototypes are built.
0:01:39 History of Supercomputing: The facility's computing power has grown exponentially, from the 50-megaflop ILLIAC IV in the 1970s and 2-gigaflop Cray-2 in the 1980s to the current 7.5-petaflop Pleiades system—a performance increase of nearly a billion times.
0:03:42 Infrastructure and Efficiency: The facility consumes 6-7 megawatts of power. To improve efficiency, NASA is moving to modular, containerized supercomputers that use direct-on-chip water cooling. This lowers the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) from 1.25 in the traditional data center to an extremely efficient 1.05, cutting cooling-related electricity costs by 20%.
0:05:55 The New Athena System and Power Backup: A new supercomputer, "Athena," is being deployed in these modular containers. To ensure 24/7 operation, the facility uses a rotational flywheel UPS system that provides power during the brief gap before massive diesel generators kick in during a grid outage.
0:08:13 Pleiades Supercomputer Scale: The current main system, Pleiades, consists of 161 racks containing approximately 250,000 Intel Xeon CPU cores, 900 terabytes of memory, and connects to a tape storage facility holding hundreds of petabytes of data.
0:09:17 The Hyperwall Visualization System: A key tool for data analysis is the Hyperwall, a visualization supercomputer composed of 128 individual compute nodes, each driving a 4K monitor. The resulting 16x8 grid creates a half-billion-pixel display for collaborative, real-time exploration of massive datasets.
0:12:28 Experimental Data: Pressure Sensitive Paint (PSP): To analyze aerodynamics, researchers use a special paint on wind tunnel models. The paint's luminophores are "quenched" by oxygen; its brightness is inversely proportional to local air pressure. High-speed cameras capture these changes, creating a high-resolution map of surface pressure dynamics that requires supercomputing to process.
0:17:26 Computational Data: The LAVA Solver: Complementing experiments, NASA uses its in-house LAVA CFD solver. A simulation of the SLS rocket involved a mesh with 4.5 billion nodes. Due to modern GPU acceleration, these massive simulations can now be completed overnight, a process that previously took months.
0:19:34 Solving the SLS Vibration Problem: The core of the presentation reveals how CFD and PSP data were used to solve a critical issue. A Von Kármán vortex street shedding from the solid rocket booster's forward attach points was found to resonate with a structural frequency, causing dangerous vibrations. The solution was to add small aerodynamic strakes, which generate a stable, energetic vortex that disrupts the formation of the harmful oscillating vortex street.
0:25:05 Broader Applications: The Hyperwall is not limited to CFD. The tour concluded by demonstrating its ability to display astronomical images from the Vera Rubin Observatory at their full native resolution, showcasing its value for any field generating massive visual datasets.