Columbia (supercomputer)

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.