Supercomputers/Systems/Columbia
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Columbia
Operated by NASA at NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 51.87 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 60.96 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 85.1%
- Cores
- 10,160
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - SGI Altix, Itanium 2 Montecito, NUMAlink and InfiniBand | SGI HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
NASA's SGI Altix system at Ames, second on the November 2004 TOP500. NASA's own page labels it a 2004 to 2013 legacy system and says installation took 120 days, which is where the decommission year comes from; the performance figures rest on TOP500 alone.
Timeline
- 2004 First operational source
- 2004-11 List debut at #2 (November 2004) source
- 2013 Decommissioned source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility
- Location
- Moffett Field, CA, USA
- Cooling
- Air and liquid hybrid
- Commissioned
- 1987
Change history
- 2026-09-20 Added with a rank pointer on the edition where it ranked highest
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| nas.nasa.gov | names system only | - |
| top500.org | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.