Columbia was a
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...
built by
Silicon Graphics (SGI) for the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), installed in 2004 at the
NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility located at
Moffett Field in
California. Named in honor of the crew who died in the
Space Shuttle ''Columbia'' disaster, it increased NASA's supercomputing capacity ten-fold for the agency's science, aeronautics and exploration programs.
Missions run on Columbia include high-fidelity simulations of the Space Shuttle vehicle and launch systems, hurricane track prediction, global ocean circulation, and the physics of supernova detonations.
History
Columbia debuted as the second most powerful supercomputer on the
TOP500 list in November 2004 at a
LINPACK rating of 51.87 teraflops, or 51.87 trillion floating point calculations per second.
By June 2007 it had dropped to 13th.
It was originally composed of 20 interconnected SGI
Altix 3700 512-processor multi-rack systems running SUSE Linux Enterprise, using
Intel Itanium 2
Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computin ...
Montecito and
Montvale processors.
In 2006, NASA and SGI added four new Altix 4700 nodes containing 256 dual-core processors, which decreased the physical footprint and the power cost of the supercomputer.
The nodes were connected with
InfiniBand single and double data rate (SDR and DDR) cabling with transfer speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second.
The SGI Altix platform was selected due to a positive experience with
Kalpana, a single-node Altix 512-CPU system built and operated by NASA and SGI and named after ''Columbia'' astronaut
Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian-born woman to fly in space. Kalpana was later integrated into the Columbia supercomputer system as the first node of twenty.
At its peak, Columbia had a total of 10,240 processors and 20 terabytes of memory, 440 terabytes of online storage, and 10 petabytes of archival tape storage.
The Project Columbia team, composed mostly of computer scientists and engineers from NAS, SGI, and Intel, were awarded the Government Computer News (GCN) Agency Award for Innovation in 2005 for deploying Columbia's original 10,240 processors in an unprecedented 120 days.
It was slowly phased out as its successors at NAS, the
petascale Pleiades supercomputer and the
Endeavour
Endeavour or endeavor may refer to:
People
Fictional characters
* Endeavour Morse, central character of the ''Inspector Morse'' novels by Colin Dexter
* Endeavor, the hero name for the character Enji Todoroki from the anime series ''My Hero A ...
shared-memory system, expanded to meet with NASA's growing high-end computing needs. At the time of its decommissioning in March 2013, Columbia was made up of four nodes over 40 SGI Altix 4700 racks, containing Intel Itanium 2 Montecito and Montvale processors to make up a total of 4,608 cores with a theoretical peak of 30 teraflops and total memory of 9 terabytes.
References
External links
{{commons, Columbia (supercomputer)
TOP500 Official WebsiteTOP500 Columbia System entry
NASA supercomputers
Ames Research Center
SGI supercomputers
One-of-a-kind computers
Very long instruction word computing