NASA’s EMIT sensor has identified ocean waste from orbit and investigated the influence of various minerals on Earth’s climate. So, what sorts of computers does NASA employ to achieve such remarkable accomplishments? How does their technology stack up against the top consumer PCs available today? Unsurprisingly, NASA’s supercomputers operate at a level distinctly higher than even the priciest consumer systems on the market.
The agency openly shares information about the technology utilized in their elite computing program via a publicly available computing systems overview document. The most powerful supercomputer in their arsenal is Athena, which became operational in January 2026. Athena can deliver over 20 petaflops of peak performance, making it approximately 190 times quicker than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card utilized in modern gaming computers. NASA’s use of supercomputers at the Advanced Supercomputing Facility in Moffett Field, CA, is bolstered by an archival storage capacity of 1,400 petabytes.
However, it isn’t solely about supercomputers. NASA’s standard offices comply with the government-wide strategic solutions baseline specifications for workstations, which involve using standard business-class desktops and laptops. This means NASA personnel spend a significant part of their day operating in Windows 11 on PCs equipped with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) components, similar to those of a typical office employee.