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	Click on the above image to see/hear Press Conference Slides and Audio of Francois Fressin describing Kepler's unique BLENDER method of validating exoplanets, ruling out false positives caused by eclipsing binary stars that may be nearly in line with the candidate exoplanet host star. This very demanding analysis calls for use of the Pleiades supercomputer. In addition, the Kepler Science Operations Center uses Pleiades for the transiting planet search and data validation modules, which are the most computationally intensive elements of the Kepler pipeline. They recently completed their first 8 quarter (q1-q8) run on Pleaides: 190,923 targets searched using 193,591 CPU-hours on 15,690 processors.

Pleiades, located at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., supports more than 1,000 active users around the country who are advancing our knowledge about the Earth, solar system and the universe....

"We're really excited that Pleiades delivered nearly 83 percent of the theoretical peak performance," said Rupak Biswas, chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames. "This means our science and engineering users get extremely efficient use of their computing time on the system. Reaching the sustained petaflop per second rate is a significant milestone for NASA and its industry partners."

...Pleiades now contains 23,296 Intel(R) Xeon(R) quad- and hex-core processors (111,104 cores in 182 racks) that can run at a theoretical peak of approximately 1.32 quadrillion floating point operations, or calculations, per second. It achieved an official sustained rate of 1.09 petaflop per second using the LINPACK benchmark, the industry standard for measuring a system's floating point computing power....

For more information about the Pleiades supercomputer, visit: http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/pleiades.html

For information about the TOP500 list, visit: http://www.top500.org

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