Columbia (supercomputer)

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 (Provided by Dataram), 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.

References

1. ^ "November 2006 - TOP500 Supercomputing Sites". TOP500. http://www.top500.org/system/ranking/7288. Retrieved 2007-05-22. 
2. ^ TOP500 List - June 2008 (1-100) | TOP500 Supercomputing Sites
3. ^ "11 September 2007: NASA Buys Big Xeon-Linux Cluster from SGI". computerwire. http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=4BB10C99-8E6D-4804-81D0-4062B05B5B7D. Retrieved 2008-01-31. 
4. ^ "Columbia System Facts". NASA. 2007-01-31. http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Resources/Systems/columbia.html. Retrieved 2007-03-27. 

External links

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

This supercomputer-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.v · Categories: Supercomputers One-of-a-kind computers Computer hardware stubs Wikimedia Foundation. 2010. Игры ⚽ Поможем написать курсовую Annihilator Invasive species in Australia Look at other dictionaries: Columbia (Supercomputer) — Columbia ist der Name eines Supercomputers, der im Jahr 2004 von der amerikanischen Raumfahrtbehörde NASA in Betrieb genommen wurde. Er wird vor allem für Simulationen verwendet, um beispielsweise das Verhalten von Raketen oder des Space Shuttles …   Deutsch Wikipedia Columbia (суперкомпьютер) — Columbia …   Википедия Columbia — ist der Name folgender Orte: British Columbia, Provinz in Kanada District of Columbia, Bundesdistrikt der USA Columbia County (Arkansas), County in Arkansas Columbia (South Carolina) Columbia (Alabama) Columbia (Connecticut) Columbia (Illinois)… …   Deutsch Wikipedia Supercomputer — Der Columbia Supercomputer der NASA mit 20x 512 Intel Itanium 2 Prozessoren …   Deutsch Wikipedia Columbia — Not to be confused with Colombia, the country in South America. Columbia may refer to: Contents 1 Places 1.1 Towns and cities in the United States …   Wikipedia Columbia (Raumfähre) — Die Columbia vor ihrem Jungfernflug am 12. April 1981 Die Raumfähre Columbia war das erste weltraumtaugliche Space Shuttle der NASA und das erste wiederverwendbare Raumfahrzeug. Im März 1979 fertiggestellt, erfolgte der Jungfernflug am 12. April… …   Deutsch Wikipedia Supercomputer — A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation (at the time of its introduction). The term Super Computing was first used by New York World newspaper in 1929 [cite book |last=Eames …   Wikipedia Columbia University Physics Department — Pupin Hall, home of the Physics Department The Columbia University Physics Department includes approximately 40 faculty members teaching and conducting research in the areas of astrophysics, high energy nuclear physics, high energy particle… …   Wikipedia Kalpana (supercomputer) — 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 …   Wikipedia Project Columbia — Columbia ist der Name eines Supercomputers, der im Jahr 2004 von der amerikanischen Raumfahrtbehörde NASA in Betrieb genommen wurde. Er wird vor allem für Simulationen verwendet, um beispielsweise das Verhalten von Raketen oder des Space Shuttles …   Deutsch Wikipedia 18+ © Academic, 2000-2024 Contact us: Technical Support, Advertising Dictionaries export, created on PHP, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, MODx. Mark and share Search through all dictionaries Translate… Search Internet Share the article and excerpts Direct link … Do a right-click on the link above and select “Copy Link”