Endeavour is a

shared memory In computer science, shared memory is memory that may be simultaneously accessed by multiple programs with an intent to provide communication among them or avoid redundant copies. Shared memory is an efficient means of passing data between progr ...

supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedi ...

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) labora ...

. It was named after the

Space Shuttle Endeavour Space Shuttle ''Endeavour'' ( Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV-105) is a retired orbiter from NASA's Space Shuttle program and the fifth and final operational Shuttle built. It embarked on its first mission, STS-49, in May 1992 and its 25th an ...

, the last orbiter built during NASA's Space Shuttle Program. Built in February 2013 as a replacement for 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, it consists of two nodes across three SGI UV 2000 racks with 1,536

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

Xeon E5-4650L “Sandy Bridge” processors for a theoretical processing capability of 32

teraflops In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate me ...

. Its global shared-memory environment allows for one processor to access the memory of other processors in the cluster as needed, giving users the ability to run jobs larger and more data-intensive than could be achieved on other NASA systems limited by processor memory. At the time it was installed, Endeavour had more processing power than what remained of Columbia at its decommissioning (approximately 30 teraflops across 40 SGI Altix 4700 racks), but in only ten percent of the physical space. It is currently one of two systems owned and operated by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division, along with

Pleiades The Pleiades (), also known as The Seven Sisters, Messier 45 and other names by different cultures, is an asterism and an open star cluster containing middle-aged, hot B-type stars in the north-west of the constellation Taurus. At a distance ...

, NASA's flagship supercomputer based on SGI ICE architecture and several generations of Intel Xeon processors.

References

NASA supercomputers Ames Research Center X86 supercomputers One-of-a-kind computers SGI supercomputers {{compu-hardware-stub