NASA's new lunar supercomputer is more powerful and environmentally friendly.

NASA has officially launched a new supercomputer, aitken, at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. It uses a modular design, requires less power and power than traditional facilities, and enables researchers to carry out complex simulations more quickly.

Aitken can run the simulation with a theoretical performance of up to 3.69 petaflops with a storage space of 221 TB. It has 1150 nodes and 46080 cores, uses a HPE SGI 8600 system, and uses second-generation Intel Xeon processors and Mellanox InfiniBand for network connectivity.

To keep all computing power cool, the shell module uses a California environment and uses "outdoor air, fan technology and circulating water system" to eliminate heat from the computer. It is the first of 16 potential modules that can be built quickly and can be used for computing and data storage.

The concept is based on a prototype facility called Elektra built in 2016, which installs supercomputers in a pair of environmentally friendly modules outside NASA's main facility. According to NASA, the use of electricity and cooling modules saved 2 million kilowatt hours of electricity and more than 3 million gallons of water in fiscal year 2018 compared to those installed in major facilities.

The new supercomputer will be used by more than 1500 scientists and engineers across the country, including developing more efficient quad vehicles or simulating the interior of the sun. The work at the top of the priority list will run the modeling and simulation of the entrance, decency, and moon landing of the Artemis project.