Columbia (supercomputer) - Definition and Overview

Columbia is a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics for NASA.

According to the TOP500 list, it is currently the second fastest computer in the world running at 51.9 teraflops, or 51.9 trillion floating point calculations per second.

It is composed of twenty SGI Altix 3000 nodes each of which have 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors bringing the total number of processors to 10,240. It was named in honour of the crew of the space shuttle Columbia.

The reason the SGI Altix was chosen was (amongst other factors) a positive experience with Kalpana, an earlier supercomputer in use at NASA which was composed of a single Altix node. Kalpana now composes the first of the twenty nodes of Columbia.

The computers are connected together with a Voltaire InfiniBand ISR 9288 288 port switch with transfer speeds of up to 10 gigabytes (or 10240 megabytes) per second.

External links and references

• NASA Columbia homepage (http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Projects/Columbia/columbia.html)
• TOP500 entry (http://www.top500.org/sublist/System.php?id=7288)
• "One Giant Leap" – SGI information on the construction of Columbia (http://www.sgi.com/features/2004/oct/columbia/) (image gallery (http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/virt_presskit/project_columbia/columbia_images.html))
• Press release from SGI (http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2004/october/worlds_fastest.html)
• Press release from NASA (http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/oct/HQ_04353_columbia.txt)