Columbia (supercomputer)
Encyclopedia
Space Shuttle Columbia disaster
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster occurred on February 1, 2003, when shortly before it was scheduled to conclude its 28th mission, STS-107, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas and Louisiana during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, resulting in the death of all seven crew members...
, Columbia is a supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
built by Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
for NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
. 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
NASA Research and Engineering Network
The NASA Research and Engineering Network is a nationwide Wide Area Network which connects selected NASA centers and peers with other high-performance network test-beds. It enables NASA scientists, engineers, and researchers to reach their partners within other federal agencies and academia.The...
and was installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility
NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility
The NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division is located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California ....
in 2004.
According to the TOP500
TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...
list of the fastest supercomputers, it entered the list in November 2004 at position 2, running at 51.87 teraflops
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...
, or 51.87 trillion floating point
Floating point
In computing, floating point describes a method of representing real numbers in a way that can support a wide range of values. Numbers are, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16...
calculations per second. By June 2007 it had dropped to position 13, and by June 2008 was at position 25.
It is composed of twenty SGI Altix 3000
Altix
Altix is a line of servers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics , based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers....
nodes running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a Linux distribution supplied by SUSE and targeted at the business market. It is targeted for servers, mainframes, and workstations but can be installed on desktop computers for testing as well. New major versions are released at an interval of 3-4 years, while...
9
each of which has 512 Intel
Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...
Itanium 2 processor
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
s bringing the total number of processors to 10,240.
It has 20 terabytes of memory (Provided by Dataram
Dataram
Dataram Corporation is an international manufacturer of computer memory, storage, and software products, founded in 1967 as a supplier of original equipment memory to Digital Equipment Corporation.-Company overview:...
), 440 terabytes of storage, and 10 petabytes of archive storage.
The SGI Altix platform was selected due to a positive experience with Kalpana
Kalpana (supercomputer)
Kalpana is a supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center operated by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division . It is named in honor of the late astronaut Kalpana Chawla, who was killed in the Columbia disaster...
, 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
InfiniBand
InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications link used in high-performance computing and enterprise data centers. Its features include high throughput, low latency, quality of service and failover, and it is designed to be scalable...
ISR 9288 288 port switch
Network switch
A network switch or switching hub is a computer networking device that connects network segments.The term commonly refers to a multi-port network bridge that processes and routes data at the data link layer of the OSI model...
with transfer speeds of up to 10 gigabit
Gigabit
The gigabit is a multiple of the unit bit for digital information or computer storage. The prefix giga is defined in the International System of Units as a multiplier of 109 , and therefore...
s (or 1250 megabyte
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
s) per second, 10 Gigabit Ethernet
10 Gigabit Ethernet
The 10 gigabit Ethernet computer networking standard was first published in 2002. It defines a version of Ethernet with a nominal data rate of 10 Gbit/s , ten times faster than gigabit Ethernet.10 gigabit Ethernet defines only full duplex point to point links which are generally connected by...
and multiple 1 gigabit Ethernet nodes.