The Columbia Supercomputer at NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Facility at Ames Research Center

Named in honor of the crew who died in the Columbia disaster, Columbia is a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics for NASA. Its main purpose was to simulate the violent collision and merger of spiral galaxies that lead to the formation of elliptical galaxies. It is connected to the NASA Research and Engineering Network and was installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility in 2004.

According to the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers, it entered the list in November 2004 at position 2,^[1] running at 51.87 teraflops, or 51.87 trillion floating point calculations per second. By June 2007 it had dropped to position 13, and by June 2008 was at position 25.^[2] It is composed of twenty SGI Altix 3000 nodes running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9^[3] each of which has 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors bringing the total number of processors to 10,240. It has 20 terabytes of memory, 440 terabytes of storage, and 10 petabytes of archive storage.^[4]

The SGI Altix platform was selected due to a positive experience with Kalpana, a single Altix 512-CPU system operated by NASA Ames which was integrated into the Columbia supercomputer system.

The computers are connected together with a Voltaire InfiniBand ISR 9288 288 port switch with transfer speeds of up to 10 gigabits (or 1250 megabytes) per second, 10 gigabit Ethernet and multiple 1 gigabit Ethernet nodes.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Columbia (supercomputer)

• NASA Columbia homepage
• TOP500 entry
• Press release from SGI
• Press release from NASA

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