NASA-SGI Team Builds World's First Working Parallel Supercomputer of its Kind

  NASA Press Release: 98-62AR,
  November 6, 1998

The world's first working 256 processor supercomputer is now being tested at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, after the machine was built and programmed by a NASA-Silicon Graphics, Inc. team. The computer is 256 microprocessors linked to make one huge supercomputer.
     With the new supercomputer, called "Steger," NASA scientists will attempt to work out the largest aeronautical problems that the agency has tried to solve by using calculations ten times bigger than done before. Steger is named after Joseph Steger, a deceased NASA Ames computer scientist.
     "Our new parallel supercomputer has the potential to cut months from the design cycle of a new airplane," said Tom Lasinski, an Ames computer scientist. "Steger also can make higher fidelity computer simulations of aircraft more cost-effectively than other supercomputers."
     "With our new parallel supercomputer we can better predict how a future airplane might fly even before we build it," Lasinski said. "We get a better vision of what the plane will do, because this supercomputer allows us to use a finer grid. Having more grid points on a simulated airplane, is like using a fine-grained film to take pictures. You can see a lot more, and you see it more clearly."
     "Users will get solutions to very complex 100-million-point problems in eight hours instead of eight days," said Ames computer scientist Mark Tangney. "Smaller problems will be interactive."
     "Steger not only performs four times better than our best conventional supercomputer at Ames, but it does it at one-fourth the cost," Lasinski said. "We've been trying to do parallel computing since 1986 in a real commercial way, and we've finally done it."
     Steger is a 256 node single system image Origin2000 supercomputer, the world's largest "shared memory" machine of its type. The Steger supercomputer was assembled by Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA, using 256 computer processors. It is about as big as 20 refrigerators.
     NASA Ames developed the aeronautical computer program that enables the Steger supercomputer to solve the most complex computer problems attempted to date. Ames computer scientists modified NASA aeronautical computer code to take advantage of the unique features of the Steger Silicon Graphics machine.
     "Parallel computers have had great economic promise in the past, but were hard to program; programmers had to track where computer data would be stored in the numerous separate processors," said Bill Feiereisen, the Ames manager responsible for Steger. "But the Silicon Graphics design keeps track of the data location for the programmer, making his job more like conventional programming."
      The new parallel supercomputer is about 500 times faster than a 400-megahertz home computer, and Steger has a thousand times more random access memory, or RAM, than a 64 megabyte Pentium personal computer.
     The parallel supercomputer project is a result of cooperation between Ames and Silicon Graphics, Inc. In 1996 the company and Ames signed a memorandum of understanding that allowed them to begin to work closely together on the parallel supercomputer project.