History
Columbia debuted as the second most powerful supercomputer on the TOP500 list in November 2004 at a LINPACK rating of 51.87 teraflops, or 51.87 trillion floating point calculations per second. By June 2007 it had dropped to 13th, and by June 2008 was at 25th.
It was originally composed of 20 interconnected SGI Altix 3700 512-processor multi-rack systems running SUSE Linux Enterprise, using Intel Itanium 2 Montecito and Montvale processors. In 2006, NASA and SGI added four new Altix 4700 nodes containing 256 dual-core processors, which decreased the physical footprint and the power cost of the supercomputer. The nodes were connected with InfiniBand single and double data rate (SDR and DDR) cabling with transfer speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second.
The SGI Altix platform was selected due to a positive experience with Kalpana, a single-node Altix 512-CPU system built and operated by NAS and SGI and named after Columbia astronaut Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian-born woman to fly in space, which was later integrated into the Columbia supercomputer system as the first node of twenty.
At its peak, Columbia had a total number of 10,240 processors and 20 terabytes of memory, 440 terabytes of online storage, and 10 petabytes of archival tape storage. The Project Columbia team, composed mostly of computer scientists and engineers from NAS, SGI, and Intel were awarded the Government Computer News (GCN) Agency Award for Innovation in 2005 for deploying Columbia's original 10,240 processors in an unprecedented 120 days.
It is now being slowly phased out as its successor at NAS, the petascale Pleiades supercomputer, expands to meet with NASA’s growing high-end computing needs. As of May 2012, Columbia is made up of four SGI Altix 4700 nodes over 40 racks, containing Intel Itanium 2 Montecito and Montvale processors to make up a total of 4,608 cores with a theoretical peak of 30 teraflops and total memory of 9 terabytes.
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