 So we're here at the super computing conference here in Denver and who are you? My name is Piyush Merotra I am the division chief of the NASA ground super computing division out at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley So in the Bay Area. So what kind of a super computing stuff does NASA do? NASA is using supercomputing for all kind of research including for aeronautics research like design of airplanes Acoustics across airplanes design of crew vehicles launch vehicles So there's a fair amount of competition for dynamics going on there And also uses for supercomputing for the science mission director, which is like earth science Should we walk over there? For example, if I if I look if you look at all these others is this This is kind of different different kind of work that There's also on the other side if you want to go to the other side. Yeah, so what are we looking at here? So this is Designing each year for space vehicles space vehicles when they come come down They have to face a lot of heat as they're coming down So NASA is looking at different kinds of materials to be able to put in there so that Vehicle will be safe as it comes down in the atmosphere because there's this awesome movie Hollywood movie with those Ladies that were counting or in the office hidden figures hidden figures. That's a great movie, right? Yes, but now the supercomputers doing that. Oh, it's so in fact at that point they were called computers Because they would be the ones that the scientists gave their computation to and then these ladies would sit there and do the computation by hand and now Machines are doing the same thing as opposed to ladies doing the computation the machines are doing all the competition They obviously much faster and have a much higher capacity of doing that Space missions can be much more precisely calculated somehow They can be calculated like I said design of crew vehicles has to be safe and they have to be able to Go through air and land properly on the science Machinery side. They're looking at astrophysics. What how is the planet's form house galaxies form black holes? Planetary science Kepler is a project that has been looking for exoplanets planets and on other stars which may be habitable there the earth science is looking at climate and weather modeling and all kinds of Issues of how we Work on earth and how what do we do when we go to space both sides NASA looks not only at space But what is happening inside? That's the reason to go to space to understand earth better, right? That's right If we can understand what's happening in space what's happening our planet to form then we can understand how our There are antecedents and understand Super computing is something that So And one of the things that we just did innovatively is to look at different facilities to be able to expand it So we have just put together a HPC system, so this is running in a container and uses northern California weather to actually cool the system so outside the air is used to pull the system and if If it becomes too hot then there is a adaptive Sort of a swamps cooler which has a fiber curtain and water runs through that and that Putting the thing in the building We have been able to save about 99% of the water that we use for similar systems inside and outside Making it a very energy efficient way of actually expanding our HPC facilities This is something that we've just done at NASA Ames in the Silicon Valley Is this something that can be open sourced and everybody else can use that when NASA does stuff is always open source Oh, yes. Yeah unless it is there's some security issues like We don't want to send this out to China China or some other country most of our stuff is open source because we let We're doing the government and so we're doing it with tax dollars and it is for the public And so the commercial companies want to do something they can take this and do it so if I take over here just Here's some stuff with Rocket design is big deal right? There's a new rockets coming. Yes This is this is the space launch system. And so this is work that's been done actually again in my Division itself and they're building aerodynamic databases So for rocket design what they do is they run a lot of cases where they change the design They change the parameters a little bit and see what regime will the rocket work in properly and what So they have to build a whole database of Should we walk to the other side? So Super conceding what what do you think is happening right now? What's going to happen in the future? Oh very very fast evolving And you know people already looking we are at the most of the machines now are at pera scale level So we are now they're looking at excess scale So that's the next level one thousand factor from pera scale to excess scale and that's what the next Step is to get to excess scale Obviously the issue is that excess scale starts becoming very large and in particular requires a lot of energy Just sort of run the machine and so we have to look at energy efficient ways of doing that So you you're going to be part of the excess scale Realization like making it happen. We are we're trying to be there right there We're NASA is at right behind the bleeding edge Because our focus is on the product and productivity of the scientists and engineers So we want to build system which the users can use right now as opposed to building something Which may be useful 10 years down the road Having said that we're also looking at advanced computing for example We have a quantum computer that we quantum annealing device that we host in our system building itself Which is a collaboration between Google and NASA and this is a d-wave machine that you host there and They is used for quantum Algorithms to try and understand how we can do optimization Problems and try and solve problems that NASA is interested in can we do it on a quantum computer as faster than? Classical computer quantum computers are happening much later or or is it something that's Is it is it possible? Can you kind of like describe? What's special about a quantum computer? Oh, how soon is it gonna happen? So there are Machines available today, but they are very small machines, you know and mostly in a research prototype environment There's only one commercial company or at least one commercial company that has been successful right now d-wave out of Canada And we have a d-wave machine that we are experimenting with but this is sort of like computing in the 50s and 60s It's at that level and it'll take a few years 10 15 years for it to become in a production environment Google is very interested in it. There are lots of labs like MIT You see Santa Barbara that are working on the physics of it and then the algorithms that can be used to actually Utilize the quantum computer So you're predicting weather events This is solar eclipse solar eclipse So this was this was when the solar eclipse is there the machine our machine was used to actually simulate what would happen Here is helicopter analysis or drone analysis. It's kind of like a Flying car well, this is actually drones drones just simple drones and They do analysis to figure out whether these doings will be stable or not What kind of turbulence with the meat and things like that what kind of design? How do the blade interact with each other so that's the kind of work that goes on here and How many people are working on this this area at NASA? How big team are you have so this supercomputing division as such the the facility that provides the supercomputing cycles We have about I would say a hundred hundred twenty people that we use But then the scientists and engineers that use the machine are from all over United States anybody who a NASA scientist an engineer or anybody who has a NASA grant has a NASA collaboration Can use that machine? Obviously, they have to be allocated the time to use it But once they get the allocation there, so we have about sixteen hundred users on the machine about six seven hundred projects at any time That's the main machine and what are you going to be doing here during the supercomputing event? You have some nice big displays There's going to be a bunch of people around here What are you going to be showing and talking about all the posters that you see and the demo stands? These are people who have been doing work using supercomputers And so there are these people are going to be in particular Some of them have been chosen to present their work here in a half an hour talk using the big display It's called the type of all that we have out there and that's Just present the work to them There's the audience so that they can expose them to what NASA does and how NASA is All right, so thanks a lot