Columbia is a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics for NASA. The supercomputer was installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility in 2004.
According to the TOP500 list, it is currently the eighth[1] fastest computer in the world running at 51.87 teraflops, or 51.87 trillion floating point calculations per second.[2]
It is composed of twenty SGI Altix 3000 nodes each of which have 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors bringing the total number of processors to 10,240. It has 20 terabytes of RAM, 440 terabytes of storage, and 10 petabytes of archive storage.[3] It was named in honor of the crew STS-107, who were killed in the Columbia disaster.
The SGI Altix platform was selected due to a positive experience with Kalpana, a single Altix 512-CPU system operated by NASA Ames which was integrated into the Columbia supercomputer system.
The computers are connected together with a Voltaire InfiniBand ISR 9288 288 port switch with transfer speeds of up to 10 gigabits (or 1250 megabytes) per second, 10 gigabit Ethernet and multiple 1 gigabit Ethernet nodes.
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