High-End Computing Capability
Computing power to answer NASA's complex science and engineering questions
Columbia Supercomputer
The Columbia supercomputer has made it possible for NASA to achieve breakthroughs in science and engineering for all of the agency's mission areas, particularly in space exploration. When the original system was installed in 2004, it was ranked second on the list of the top most powerful supercomputers in the world at 63 teraflop/s.
As the Pleiades supercomputer expands, Columbia is gradually being phased out, to be replaced with next-generation technology.
System Architecture
- Manufacturer: SGI
- 40 compute node cabinets
- 30 Tflop/s theoretical peak (original 10,240 system: 63 Tflop/s)
- Total Memory: 9 TB
- Nodes
- 1 SGI® Altix® 4700 (512 cores)
- Intel® Itanium® processors (Montecito)
- 1.6 GHz
- 9MB
- 1 SGI Altix 4700 (2,048 cores)
- Intel Itanium processors (Montecito)
- 1.6 GHz
- 9 MB
- 2 SGI Altix 4700 (1,024 cores)
- Intel Itanium processors (Montvale)
- 1.6 GHz
- 9 MB
- 4 total compute nodes (4,608 total cores)
- Memory Type: Double data rate synchronous dynamic random access memory (DDR SDRAM)
- 2 GB per core
Subsystems
- 1 front-end node
Interconnects
- SGI® NUMAlink® interconnected single-system image compute nodes (enable large SSI)
- Internode
- InfiniBand®: 4x (Single Data Rate, Double Data Rate)
- 10 Gb Ethernet LAN/WAN interconnect
- 1 Gb Ethernet LAN/WAN interconnect
Storage
- Online: DataDirect Networks® and LSI® RAID, 800 TB (raw)
- 1 SGI CXFS domain
- Local SGI XFS
- Archival: Attached to high-end computing SGI CXFS storage area network filesystem
Operating Environment
- Operating system: SUSE® Linux® Enterprise
- Job scheduler: PBS®
- Compilers - C, Intel Fortran, SGI MPT
User Quick Links
Can't find what you're looking for? NAS Control Room staff are available 24x7x365: (800) 331-8737, (650) 604-4444, support@nas.nasa.gov
Now at HECC
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