Columbia (supercomputer)

Columbia
Active	2004 - 2013
Sponsors	National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), USA
Operators	NAS, SGI
Location	NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California
Architecture	SGI Altix 3700/4700, 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors, InfiniBand SDR and DDR interconnect
Operating system	SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Memory	20 terabytes
Storage	440 terabytes of online storage, 10 petabytes of archival tape storage
Speed	63 teraflops theoretical performance
Ranking	TOP500: 2, November 2004

Columbia was a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics (SGI) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), installed in 2004 at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility located at Moffett Field in California. Named in honor of the crew who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, it increased NASA's supercomputing capacity ten-fold for the agency's science, aeronautics and exploration programs.

Missions run on Columbia include high-fidelity simulations of the Space Shuttle vehicle and launch systems, hurricane track prediction, global ocean circulation, and the physics of supernova detonations.^[1]

^ "NASA Unveils Its Newest, Most Powerful Supercomputer". NASA. October 2004. Archived from the original on 2004-11-02. Retrieved 2012-05-23.

[nasa2004-1] "NASA Unveils Its Newest, Most Powerful Supercomputer". NASA. October 2004. Archived from the original on 2004-11-02. Retrieved 2012-05-23.

[1]