NASA Activates Athena Supercomputer, Boosting High-Performance Computing Capabilities

NASA Activates Athena Supercomputer, Boosting High-Performance Computing Capabilities January 29, 2026 NASA has officially brought its new "Athena" supercomputer online, marking a significant upgrade to the agency's computational resources for space exploration and scientific research. The activation addresses a critical need within the agency, which has been grappling with oversubscribed and overburdened high-end computing (HEC) systems, as highlighted in a 2024 report by NASA's Office of Inspector General. The 20.13-petaflop system, now operational at NASA's Modular Supercomputing Facility at the Ames Research Center in California, replaces the decommissioned 7.09-petaflop Pleiades supercomputer. Athena is a CPU-based system comprised of 1,024 nodes powered by AMD's Epyc Turin processors and features 786 terabytes of memory. It forms a core part of NASA's High-End Computing Capability (HECC) project and will be made available to both internal NASA researchers and external scientists supporting agency programs. Kevin Murphy, NASA's chief science data officer, emphasized the system's role in advancing the agency's mission, stating, "Exploration has always driven NASA to the edge of what’s computationally possible. Now with Athena, NASA will expand its efforts to provide tailored computing resources that meet the evolving needs of its missions." Athena joins a fleet of NASA supercomputers that includes the 20.67-petaflop Cabeus, the 13.12-petaflop Aitken, and several others. The deployment follows recent efforts to alleviate computational bottlenecks, including a March 2025 upgrade that added 350 Nvidia GH200 nodes to the Cabeus system, increasing its power by over 13 petaflops. The 2024 OIG report had specifically noted that NASA's missions were being hampered by HEC resources that were largely CPU-based and insufficient for specialized tasks, recommending the establishment of an executive team to better align resources with mission needs. The introduction of Athena represents a strategic step in modernizing NASA's computational infrastructure. By significantly increasing available processing power and memory, the system is poised to accelerate complex simulations in astrophysics, climate modeling, and aerospace engineering, thereby supporting future crewed and robotic exploration initiatives. Source: datacenterdynamics