Kalpana 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 ...

at NASA Ames Research Center operated by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division and named in honor of

astronaut An astronaut (from the Ancient Greek (), meaning 'star', and (), meaning 'sailor') is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member aboard a spacecraft. Although generally r ...

Kalpana Chawla, who was killed in the Space Shuttle ''Columbia'' disaster and had worked as an engineer at Ames Research Center prior to joining the Space Shuttle program. It was built in late 2003 and dedicated on May 12, 2004. Kalpana was the world's first single-system image (SSI) Linux supercomputer, based on

SGI SGI may refer to: Companies *Saskatchewan Government Insurance *Scientific Games International, a gambling company *Silicon Graphics, Inc., a former manufacturer of high-performance computing products *Silicon Graphics International, formerly Rac ...

's Altix 3000 architecture and 512 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 ...

processors. It was originally built in a joint effort by the

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center in the City of La Cañada Flintridge, California, United States. Founded in the 1930s by Caltech researchers, JPL is owned by NASA an ...

, Ames Research Center (AMC), and

Goddard Space Flight Center The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC empl ...

to perform high-res ocean analysis with the ECCO (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean) Consortium model. The supercomputer was "used to develop substantially more capable simulation models to better assess the evolution and behavior of the Earth's climate system," said NASA's Deputy Associate Administrator for Earth Science,

Ghassem Asrar Ghassem R. Asrar is an Iranian-American scientist in the field of Earth and space science. Since November 2019 he has served as the Senior Vice President for Science at the Universities Space Research Association. Education and early years Asra ...

in 2004. It served as one of several testbed systems NASA purchased to determine what architecture to proceed with for new supercomputing projects and lead to the purchase and construction of the

Columbia Columbia may refer to: * Columbia (personification), the historical female national personification of the United States, and a poetic name for America Places North America Natural features * Columbia Plateau, a geologic and geographic region in ...

supercomputer, named in honor of the STS-107 crew lost in 2003. In July 2004 the Kalpana system was integrated, as the first node, into the 20-node supercomputer.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kalpana (Supercomputer) NASA supercomputers Ames Research Center One-of-a-kind computers Kalpana Chawla Very long instruction word computing SGI supercomputers