NASA has announced the availability of its newest supercomputer, Athena, an advanced system designed to support a new generation of missions and research projects. Housed in the agency’s Modular Supercomputing Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, Athena delivers more computing power than any other NASA system, surpassing the capabilities of its predecessors, Aitken and Pleiades, in power and efficiency. “Exploration has always driven NASA to the edge of what’s computationally possible,” said Kevin Murphy, chief science data officer and lead for the agency’s High-End Computing Capability portfolio at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now with Athena, NASA will expand its efforts to provide tailored computing resources that meet the evolving needs of its missions.”The supercomputer is available to NASA researchers and external scientists and researchers supporting NASA programs who can apply for time to use the system. Managed by NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer, the High-End Computing Capability portfolio supports a flexible, hybrid computing approach that combines supercomputers with access to other tools, such as commercial cloud platforms.