Computing power to answer NASA's complex science and engineering questions
HECC Legacy System
The Columbia supercomputer gained worldwide recognition in 2004 for increasing NASA's key high-end computing capability ten-fold for missions in aeronautics, space exploration, and Earth and space sciences. Its combined speed and productivity made Columbia the most powerful supercomputer of its time. The system was critical to NASA's Return to Flight (RTF) effort, and for near-real-time simulations that contributed to the safety of subsequent shuttle missions. The system was named to honor the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia STS-107, lost in 2003.
Among the many important scientific and engineering projects benefiting from Columbia's computational capabilities during its nine years of service:
Built in a joint effort by NASA and industry partners Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Intel, Columbia was a single-system image (SSI) supercomputer.
Columbia was installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center by a team of computer scientists and engineers from NAS, SGI, and Intel. The team received the 2005 Government Computer News Agency Award for Innovation for installing the original 10,240-processor system in an unprecedented 120 days. At the 2005 International Supercomputing Conference, NASA was recognized for reinventing its approach to high-end computing, and for deploying one of the most successful "constellation" supercomputers in history.
The system debuted in the second spot on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputer in November 2004, with a LINPACK rating of 51.9 teraflops peak performance.
In 2006 and 2007, four new SGI Altix 4700 nodes containing dual-core processors replaced some existing nodes, decreasing the physical footprint and power costs associated with the system. This allowed room for additional resources to support work in all NASA mission organizations. These four nodes remained active until early 2013 as Columbia was phased out to make way for the Pleiades and Endeavour supercomputers.
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During its nine years of service, Columbia supported many other important NASA projects, including:
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Columbia (supercomputer)