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NCCS Highlights

Project Columbia to Revolutionize NASA Supercomputing

On July 27, NASA announced a partnership with two major Silicon Valley corporations, SGI and Intel, to dramatically increase the Agency’s supercomputing capacity to meet critical national goals. The three organizations have formed a unique, innovative partnership in which each is contributing resources and capabilities to the collaboration.

As part of ‘Project Columbia,’ NASA will integrate a cluster of 20 interconnected SGI Altix 512-processor systems, for a total of 10,240 Itanium 2 processors, to significantly increase the Agency’s capability and capacity through creation of the ‘Space Explora-tion Simulator.’ The new machine will be based at NASA Ames Research Center in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. It will provide an estimated 10-fold increase in NASA’s current supercomputing capacity. The primary purpose of Project Columbia is to revitalize NASA’s supercomputing capability by deploying an integrated computing, visualization, and data storage environment tailored to the NASA mission.

Work using the initial 512-processor Altix at Ames led to major advances in modeling the Space Shuttle as well as in the Earth sciences in high-resolution modeling of the world's oceans. These advances demonstrated the power of simulation to significantly advance NASA’s goals, and NASA’s powerful new supercomputer will allow the Agency to continue this important work. The NCCS will be working with Earth and space science investigators to quickly port codes that can take advantage of this substantial shared resource and ensure that NCCS users will have sufficient network capacity to effectively access the system and their simulation results.

In line with Office of Science and Technology Policy recommendations, a portion of the new system will be made available on a broad basis to ensure that the nation’s entire science and engineering community has access to this highly advanced supercomputer architecture.

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