Endeavour is a shared memory

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 ...

at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at

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 ...

. It was named after the

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

, the last orbiter built during NASA's Space Shuttle Program. Built in February 2013 as a replacement for the Columbia 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, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

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

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

. 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 Seven Sisters and Messier 45 (M45), is an Asterism (astronomy), asterism of an open cluster, open star cluster containing young Stellar classification#Class B, B-type stars in the northwest of the constellation Tau ...

, 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 {{super-compu-stub