Kalpana was a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of 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 instruc ...

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

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 List of human spaceflight programs, human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member of a spa ...

Kalpana Chawla Kalpana Chawla (March 17, 1962 – February 1, 2003) was an American astronaut and aerospace engineer who was the first woman of Indian origin to fly to space. Chawla expressed an interest in aerospace engineering from an early age and took engi ...

, 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 Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

supercomputer, based on SGI's Altix 3000 architecture and 512

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

Itanium 2 Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and I ...

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 (FFRDC) in La Cañada Flintridge, California, Crescenta Valley, United States. Founded in 1936 by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) research ...

(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 ...

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 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 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