New Supercomputer Blasts Off

Voltaire's InfiniBand interconnect solutions will power the world's largest supercomputer for NASA.

The new Columbia supercomputer at Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field, Calif., has achieved sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second (teraflops). NASA's Columbia supercomputer is a collaborative effort between several companies including Silicon Graphics, Intel and Voltaire, a maker of interconnect solutions for high performance grid computing.

The 10,240 CPU clustered supercomputer comprises 20 SGI Altix systems, each powered by 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors. All of the processor nodes are connected with a Voltaire ISR 9288, a 288 port, 4X (10 Gbps) InfiniBand switch, which features multi-rail support.