Columbia (supercomputer)

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

Columbia is a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics for NASA. The supercomputer 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. It is composed of twenty SGI Altix 3000 nodes running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9^[2] each of which have 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors bringing the total number of processors to 10,240. It has 20 terabytes of RAM, 440 terabytes of storage, and 10 petabytes of archive storage.^[3] It was named in honor of the crew STS-107, who were killed in the Columbia disaster.

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

^ November 2006 - TOP500 Supercomputing Sites. TOP500. Retrieved on 2007-05-22.
^ 11 September 2007: NASA Buys Big Xeon-Linux Cluster from SGI. computerwire. Retrieved on 2008-01-31.
^ Columbia System Facts. NASA (2007-01-31). Retrieved on 2007-03-27.

This computers main purpose was to calculate the violent collision and merger of the spiral galaxies that lead to the formation of the eliptical galaxies.