NASA’s Rate of Scientific Discovery to Soar, Thanks to New Supercomputer

NASA’s Rate of Scientific Discovery to Soar, Thanks to New Supercomputer

NASA’s new Columbia supercomputer, the most powerful in the world, recently sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second ( teraflops), eclipsing the performance of every other supercomputer operating today.

The computer was built from Silicon Graphics (Mountain View, CA) Altix systems and is driven by 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors. Columbia tops Japan’s famed Earth Simulator, rated at 35.86 teraflops, and IBM’s recent in-house Blue Gene/L experiment, rated at 36.01 teraflops.

Named in honor of the astronauts aboard Shuttle Columbia who perished in an in-flight explosion in 2003, the computer promises to revolutionize NASA’s scientific rate of discovery.

“Benchmarks are useful for confirming that Columbia is meeting our performance expectations, but the numbers we find most significant are something else altogether,” says Walt Brooks, Division Chief, Advanced Supercomputing Division, NASA. “For instance, we find the number five to be significant. This is because with Columbia, scientists are discovering they can potentially predict hurricane paths a full five days before the storm reaches landfall, an enormous improvement over today’s twoday warnings and one that may present huge advantages for saving human life and property.

“Also significant is the number one,” Brooks says, “because with just one of Columbia’s 20 Altix systems, we’ve reduced the time required to perform complex aircraft design analysis from years to a single day.”