Columbia (supercomputer)

Last updated
Columbia
Us-nasa-columbia.jpg
Active2004 - 2013
Sponsors National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), USA
Operators NAS, SGI
Location NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California
ArchitectureSGI Altix 3700/4700, 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors, InfiniBand SDR and DDR interconnect
Operating system SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Memory20 terabytes
Storage440 terabytes of online storage, 10 petabytes of archival tape storage
Speed63 teraflops theoretical performance
Ranking TOP500 : 2, November 2004

Columbia was a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics (SGI) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), installed in 2004 at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility located at Moffett Field in California. Named in honor of the crew who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, it increased NASA's supercomputing capacity ten-fold for the agency's science, aeronautics and exploration programs.

Contents

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. [1]

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. [2] By June 2007 it had dropped to 13th. [3]

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. [4] 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. [5] 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 NASA and SGI and named after Columbia astronaut Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian-born woman to fly in space. Kalpana was later integrated into the Columbia supercomputer system as the first node of twenty. [6]

At its peak, Columbia had a total of 10,240 processors and 20 terabytes of memory, 440 terabytes of online storage utilizing SGI's CXFS filesystem, and 10 petabytes of archival tape storage. [6] [5] 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. [7]

It was slowly phased out as its successors at NAS, the petascale Pleiades supercomputer and the Endeavour shared-memory system, expanded to meet with NASA's growing high-end computing needs. At the time of its decommissioning in March 2013, Columbia was made up of four nodes over 40 SGI Altix 4700 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.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Itanium</span> Family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors

Itanium is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture. The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel. Launched in June 2001, Intel initially marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. In the concept phase, engineers said "we could run circles around PowerPC...we could kill the x86." Early predictions were that IA-64 would expand to the lower-end servers, supplanting Xeon, and eventually penetrate into the personal computers, eventually to supplant reduced instruction set computing (RISC) and complex instruction set computing (CISC) architectures for all general-purpose applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Silicon Graphics</span> 1981–2009 American computing company

Silicon Graphics, Inc. was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and software. Founded in Mountain View, California, in November 1981 by James Clark, its initial market was 3D graphics computer workstations, but its products, strategies and market positions developed significantly over time.

Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">System X (supercomputer)</span>

System X was a supercomputer assembled by Virginia Tech's Advanced Research Computing facility in the summer of 2003. Costing US$5.2 million, it was originally composed of 1,100 Apple Power Mac G5 computers with dual 2.0 GHz processors. System X was decommissioned on May 21, 2012. The supercomputer is also known as Big Mac or Terascale Cluster.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ASCI Red</span> Supercomputer

ASCI Red was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the United States nuclear arsenal after the 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Altix</span> Supercomputer family

Altix is a line of server computers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics, based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division</span> Provides computing resources for various NASA projects

The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division is located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It has been the major supercomputing and modeling and simulation resource for NASA missions in aerodynamics, space exploration, studies in weather patterns and ocean currents, and space shuttle and aircraft design and development for almost forty years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kalpana (supercomputer)</span> Supercomputer operated by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS)

Kalpana was a supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center operated by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division and named in honor of astronaut Kalpana Chawla, who was killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and had worked as an engineer at Ames Research Center prior to joining the Space Shuttle program. It was built in late 2003 and dedicated on May 12, 2004.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is a high performance computing and networking center founded in 1986 and one of the original five NSF Supercomputing Centers. PSC is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TOP500</span> Database project devoted to the ranking of computers

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FinisTerrae</span> Supercomputer

Finisterrae was the 100th supercomputer in Top500 ranking in November 2007. Running at 12.97 teraFLOPS, it would rank at position 258 on the list as of June 2008. It is also the third most powerful supercomputer in Spain. It is located in Galicia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pleiades (supercomputer)</span> NASA supercomputer at Ames Research Center/NAS

Pleiades is a petascale supercomputer housed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center located at Moffett Field near Mountain View, California. It is maintained by NASA and partners Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel.

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tianhe-1</span> Supercomputer

Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and was one of the few petascale supercomputers in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Computer Center for Higher Education (France)</span>

The National Computer Center for Higher Education, based in Montpellier, is a public institution under the supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR) created by a decree issued in 1999. CINES offers IT services for public research in France. It is one of the major national centers for computing power supply for research in France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputing in Europe</span> Overview of supercomputing in Europe

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xeon Phi</span> Series of x86 manycore processors from Intel

Xeon Phi is a discontinued series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and application programming interfaces (APIs) such as OpenMP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Endeavour (supercomputer)</span>

Endeavour is a shared memory supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames Research Center. It was named after the Space Shuttle Endeavour, the last orbiter built during NASA's Space Shuttle Program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center</span> High performance computing center in Wyoming, US

The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a high-performance computing (HPC) and data archival facility located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that provides advanced computing services to researchers in the Earth system sciences.

Electra is a petascale supercomputer located at the Ames Research Center facility, manufactured by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2016 and commissioned at 2017. This is the first modular supercomputer prototype designed by NASA, as part of its research on making supercomputing more efficient and environment-friendly. Its research resulted in the Aitken supercomputer, destined for Moon landing and related research.

References

  1. "NASA Unveils Its Newest, Most Powerful Supercomputer". NASA. October 2004. Archived from the original on 2004-11-02. Retrieved 2012-05-23.
  2. "NASA's Newest Supercomputing Ranked Among World's Fastest". NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division. November 2004. Archived from the original on 2013-03-17. Retrieved 2012-05-23.
  3. "TOP500 Columbia System Ranking History". TOP500.
  4. "Columbia Supercomputer". NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division.
  5. 1 2 "NASA Ensures Columbia Supercomputer Will Continue to Fuel New Science with Latest SGI Technology Infusion". Silicon Graphics. November 2006. Archived from the original on 2016-06-25. Retrieved 2013-05-21.
  6. 1 2 "Innovative Partnership to Revolutionize NASA Supercomputing". NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division. July 2004. Archived from the original on 2013-03-17. Retrieved 2012-05-23.
  7. "Project Columbia Wins GCN Agency Award for Innovation". NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division. November 2005. Archived from the original on 2013-03-16. Retrieved 2012-05-23.