NASA-SGI Supercomputer: Tops in Speed and Research

Columbia, named in honor of the Space Shuttle Columbia crew and craft lost in 2003, will take National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Science Foundation (NSF), and eventually other researchers, to new heights, where hurricanes' paths can be predicted more quickly and accurately, global climate and oceanic conditions can be measured, and super physics that involves modeling the universe and the birth of stars can be performed.

"It's one hell of a system," said Columbia project manager Bill Thigpen, who told TechNewsWorld the system is being submitted for a top spot on the upcoming Top500 Supercomputer list due next month. Thigpen said IBM (NYSE: IBM) or another organization may build a bigger system to take the top spot on the speed list, but the capabilities of Columbia -- used by scientists while being constructed -- and access for scientists make the machine significant beyond its speed.

"I would say in terms of research, it's really the biggest," Thigpen said.

Super Asset

Thigpen said the estimated US$50 million Columbia system, an integrated cluster of 20 Silicon Graphics (NYSE: SGI) Altix 512-processor systems, was a "national asset."

"Scientists throughout NASA will have access, and quite a number have had access since we started bringing it on," Thigpen said, boasting of shared memory among Columbia's 10,240 Itanium 2 processors.

Thigpen added that while Columbia is already serving a broad spectrum of different scientific studies, the supercomputer will also be used by the NSF and be available to other researchers on a proposal basis.

More and More Power

Thigpen said the reason for the creation of the new super system -- which achieved unprecedented, sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second (teraflops) -- was demand from scientists who wanted more power.

"The users needed more than the system we had previously," he said. "It is pretty nice to be in a position where the users on a system this new want more and more time on it."

Thigpen also said many of the major accomplishments in research -- whether on Earth's climate, space research or other area -- come from sustained access and use of a supercomputer system.

"The breakthroughs happen with large amounts of [supercomputing] capability [as opposed to just] 10 hours or 20 hours," Thigpen said.

At a Price

Bill Claybrook, industry analyst and president of New River Marketing Research, told TechNewsWorld that despite few offerings to mainstream enterprises, Columbia creator SGI is significant in supercomputing.

"There is a small number of research organizations and so forth that will buy these machines," Claybrook said. He noted that SGI has been experiencing financial difficulties.

"The one thing they do have is a good reputation in high-performance computing."

Claybrook blamed SGI's reliance on Intel's Itanium 2 processor, which drives prices higher than other systems relying on other silicon, such as AMD's (NYSE: AMD) Opteron.

"They're stuck in that [Itanium 2] market, which leads to even higher prices."

While You Wait

Nevertheless, SGI boasted of the 20-system cluster, indicating that Columbia topped the current speed king -- Japan's Earth simulator at 35.86 teraflops and IBM's Blue Gene/L at 36.01 teraflops -- hitting the 42.7 teraflops using only 16 of the cluster's 20 installed systems.

Columbia coordinators and backers also indicated that the system was assembled in less than four months' time and was available to researchers throughout installation.

"In fact, scientists from NASA centers and universities throughout the U.S. used new Altix systems within days after they arrived at NASA," SGI said in a press release.

Thigpen told TechNewsWorld the agency had been providing access to Columbia to "targeted groups" of researchers as systems were brought in.