Columbia Supercomputer from NASA

As a contribution for this week in lab ill talk about one example of an important supercomputer. The name of this supercomputer is Columbia from the NASA named this way in honor to the crew who died in Columbia disaster; it may not be the most powerful computer nowadays but it’s really important for the history of NASA because with this one they achieved a lot of breakthroughs in science. It was original installed in 2004 and in that year it was ranked in second place of the top most powerful supercomputers. Nowadays it’s being replaced with the new Pleiades Supercomputer which its ranked in 7th place.


The Columbia System Architecture includes:
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
o 1 SGI® Altix® 4700 (512 cores)
o Intel® Itanium® processors (Montecito)
o 1.6 GHz
o 9MB
o 1 SGI Altix 4700 (2,048 cores)
o Intel Itanium processors (Montecito)
o 1.6 GHz
o 9 MB
o 2 SGI Altix 4700 (1,024 cores)
o Intel Itanium processors (Montvale)
o 1.6 GHz
o 9 MB
o 4 total compute nodes (4,608 total cores)
o Memory Type: Double data rate synchronous dynamic random access memory (DDR SDRAM)
o 2 GB per core
Subsystems


• 1 front-end node
Interconnects


• SGI® NUMAlink® interconnected single-system image compute nodes (enable large SSI)
• Internode
o InfiniBand®: 4x (Single Data Rate, Double Data Rate)
o 10 Gb Ethernet LAN/WAN interconnect
o 1 Gb Ethernet LAN/WAN interconnect
Storage


• Online: DataDirect Networks® and LSI® RAID, 800 TB (raw)
o 1 SGI CXFS domain
o 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

For more information or if you want to know about the new NASA supercomputer you can look at: http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/columbia.html