Kalpana (supercomputer)

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Kalpana is a supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center operated by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division (NAS). It is named in honor of the late astronaut Kalpana Chawla, who was killed in the Columbia disaster. It was dedicated on May 12, 2004.

The computer is a single SGI Altix 3000, with 512 Itanium 2 processors.

Kalpana was purchased in November 2003 to work on computational fluid dynamics problems for LANL, NCAR, and the ECCO Consortium. It was the first single Linux kernel 512-processor computer.

From July 2004 Kalpana was integrated, as the first node, into the 20-node Project Columbia supercomputer.