But even the most beastly consumer PC is a mere candle flame compared to the roaring sun that is NASA’s Athena. While it looks like a series of monoliths in a sterile room, its DNA is surprisingly familiar to any PC enthusiast. To understand Athena, we have to look at it not as an alien machine, but as your desktop PC – evolved and multiplied by a factor of thousands. But while your PC is a solo sprinter, Athena is a marathon start line with a quarter-million runners all moving in unison. Athena treats memory with the same logic but on a scale that defies standard logic.