The Pasadena Star-News ran an article about JPL’s supercomputing capability on Monday. The article caught my eye since my structural analysis has started using one of the JPL supercomputers in the past year or so. We’re running some of our bigger structural models through a software package called Nastran that runs on Cosmos, the 1024-node supercomputer mentioned in the article.
It’s rather amazing, really. Every time I set up a job to run, it occurs to me that I’m harnessing so much computing cycles. I mean, the biggest job I’ve done is one that took about 6 hours to complete, running on 32 processors. The article talks about the literal modeling of universes, far beyond the matrix manipulation I do. Pretty awesome.
The supercomputing group is fond of reminding people that they’re #88 in the recent top 500 list of supercomputers. And the article does mention that we’d like a new one!