NASA has placed its Athena supercomputer into service at the Modular Supercomputing Facility at the Ames Research Center, significantly increasing the agency’s high-end computing capacity for science and exploration missions.
Athena delivers 20.13 petaflops of peak performance and replaces the Pleiades system, which offered 7.09 petaflops and was retired earlier this month. The new system is part of NASA’s High-End Computing Capability programme, which supports modelling, simulation and data analysis across the agency’s mission portfolio.
The CPU-based system consists of 1,024 nodes powered by AMD EPYC Turin processors and includes about 786 terabytes of memory. NASA said Athena will be available not only to internal researchers but also to external scientists and partners supporting NASA programmes, subject to an application process.
“Now with Athena, NASA will expand its efforts to provide tailored computing resources that meet the evolving needs of its missions,” said Kevin Murphy, adding that demand for advanced computation continues to grow as missions become more data-intensive.
Athena joins a broader fleet of NASA supercomputers, including Cabeus, Aitken, Electra, Discover and Endeavour. However, the agency has faced persistent capacity constraints. A 2024 report by the NASA Office of Inspector General found that NASA’s high-end computing resources were oversubscribed, with mission directorates requesting more computing time than available systems could provide.
The watchdog also flagged NASA’s heavy reliance on CPU-based architectures as a limitation for certain workloads and recommended governance changes to better align computing investments with mission needs. NASA has since taken steps to diversify its infrastructure, including adding 350 Nvidia GH200 nodes to its Cabeus system in March 2025, increasing its performance by more than 13 petaflops.
NASA said the addition of Athena is intended to help relieve near-term pressure on computing resources while the agency continues to modernise its high-performance computing environment to support future missions.
