Kalpana was a supercomputer at

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

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) labo ...

operated by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division and named in honor of astronaut

Kalpana Chawla Kalpana Chawla (17 March 1962 – 1 February 2003) was an Indian-born American astronaut and mechanical engineer who was the first woman of Indian origin to go to space. She first flew on Space Shuttle ''Columbia'' in 1997 as a mission speciali ...

, 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 ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

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. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

Itanium 2 processors. It was originally built in a joint effort by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

(AMC), and Goddard Space Flight Center 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