Columbia was a supercomputer built by

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and sof ...

(SGI) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), installed in 2004 at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility located at

Moffett Field Moffett Federal Airfield , also known as Moffett Field, is a joint civil-military airport located in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County, California, United States, between northern Mountain View and northern Sunnyvale. On November 10 ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. 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 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinci ...

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 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 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 InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also use ...

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 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 ...

, 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 Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1015 floating point operations per second (1 petaFLOPS). Petascale computing allowed faster processing of traditional supercomputer applications. The first system ...

Pleiades supercomputer and the Endeavour 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