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NASA Puts ‘Athena’ Supercomputer Into Full Service to Power Upcoming Missions

Deployed at Ames, the 20-petaflop system now underpins Artemis II preparations.

Athena, NASA’s newest supercomputer, is housed at the agency’s Modular Supercomputing Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. NASA/Brandon Torres-Navarrete

Overview

  • Athena entered full operational use for approved users on January 14, 2026 as part of NASA’s HECC portfolio at the Modular Supercomputing Facility in California.
  • The system delivers more than 20 petaflops of peak performance—about 20 quadrillion calculations per second—surpassing Aitken and Pleiades in speed and efficiency.
  • Its architecture features 1,024 nodes built on high‑core‑count AMD EPYC processors and roughly 786 terabytes of system memory for large, complex workloads.
  • Hardware includes HPE Cray EX4000 racks running the Tri‑Lab Operating System Stack (TOSS) with professional scheduling tools to tailor research workflows.
  • NASA is granting access to agency teams and external researchers by application, with a hybrid approach that complements on‑site supercomputing with commercial cloud platforms.