Columbia (supercomputer)
Named in honor of the crew who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, Columbia is a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics (SGI) for the National Aeornautics and Space Administration (NASA).
It was installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility located at Moffett Field, California in 2004 and increased NASA's supercomputing capacity 10-fold for the agency's science, aeronautics and exploration programs. Some of the 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.
Read more about Columbia (supercomputer): History
Famous quotes containing the word columbia:
“Although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction.”
—The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, the first sentence of the article on “life” (based on wording in the First Edition, 1935)