NASA has announced the new release of Athena, its most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputer to date. The system is designed to support a wide range of space, aeronautics, and scientific research projects across the agency.
Athena is housed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and operates under the agency’s High-End Computing Capability (HECC) program, which provides advanced computing resources to NASA teams and external researchers supporting NASA missions.
Performance and Efficiency Improvements
The new supercomputer delivers more than 20 petaflops of peak performance, allowing it to perform over 20 quadrillion calculations per second. According to NASA, Athena exceeds the performance of its previous systems, Aitken and Pleiades, while also reducing overall utility costs. The system became available to users in January following a beta testing period and is now accessible to approved NASA researchers and partner organizations.
High-performance computing systems like Athena are used across NASA for tasks that require large-scale processing power. These include simulating rocket launches, modeling complex aerospace designs, analyzing scientific data, and training artificial intelligence models used in research. By running detailed simulations and data analyses, researchers can test scenarios and refine designs before physical testing takes place, helping reduce risk and development time.
Athena, whose name was selected through an internal NASA contest held in 2025 and references the Greek goddess associated with wisdom and strategy, operates within NASA’s Modular Supercomputing Facility.
The HECC program supports a hybrid computing environment that combines on-site supercomputers with access to commercial cloud platforms, allowing teams to select resources based on project requirements.
As NASA missions generate increasing volumes of data and rely more heavily on advanced simulations and machine learning, access to high-performance computing remains essential. With Athena now operational, NASA researchers have expanded computing capacity to support current and future projects.
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