ABSTRACT
To support its diverse mission-critical requirements, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) solves some of the most unique, computationally challenging problems in the world [8]. To facilitate rapid yet accurate solutions for these demanding applications, the U.S. space agency procured a 10,240-CPU supercomputer in October 2004, dubbed Columbia. Housed in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at NASA Ames Research Center, Columbia is comprised of twenty 512-processor nodes (representing three generations of SGI Altix technology: 3700, 3700-BX2, and 4700), with a combined peak processing capability of 63.2 teraflops per second (TFLOPS). However, for many applications, even this high-powered computational workhorse, currently ranked as one of the fastest in the world, does not
have enough computing capacity, memory size, and bandwidth rates needed to meet all of NASA’s diverse and demanding future mission requirements.
