The last time NASA Ames Research Center installed a new supercomputer was October 2004. The supercomputer was built by SGI and had a total of 10,240 processors. Named Columbia, in honor of the crew of the destroyed shuttle, it was fast! One month after its debut, it hit the top 500 supercomputer list at number-two. Nearly three years later, it now has slipped to number-thirteen. NASA is now getting a new supercomputer. This one is based on blade technology and is also from SGI. The new setup will arrive in four-phases and each phase will be powered by 1,024 dual-core Intel Itanium-2 processors, or 2,048 individual cores. The new supercomputer is expected to clock-in at 13.1 teraflop/s. That's a lot of compute power, but still not as fast as Columbia's fully operational 51.9 teraflop/s. It will take a while for the site to climb back up the top-500 list.
The new systems are all based on SGI Altix 4700's. With 10 blades per chassis and four chassis per cabinet, this is starting to look like a familiar form-factor. Each cabinet contains a total of 39 processor sockets, or 78 processor cores. No clue as to why there is a missing processor; however it's of no surprise that each rack consumes around 20.6kW! For the full 1,024 processor system, it should be around 27 cabinets, or just over half a megawatt. Add to that, numerous other cabinets to handle the additional storage that was ordered, it's good to know that additional datacenter space is being built at NASA Ames.
As of today with Columbia operating around the clock, the datacenter is quite full and in some places, somewhat warm. NASA took one room within the existing datacenter and modified the Columbia cabinets to include rear door liquid cooling systems. They collect directly to the chiller plant. Now the NASA Ames Supercomputing (NAS) Division has decided to expand the facility by an additional 5,000 square foot Just in time for the new cabinets to arrive!