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GCN Home > 07/28/04 web stories

NASA buys SGI supercomputer

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

NASA has procured a supercomputer from SGI of Mountain View, Calif., the agency announced today.

Dubbed Kalpana, this system will be located at NASA Ames Research Center in California.

According to NASA, the system, worth $160 million, will bring a 10-fold increase in supercomputing power to the agency. It will be used for modeling the space shuttle and the world’s atmosphere and be available to other U.S. engineers and scientists as well.

The system will consist of 20 interconnected Altix clusters running under Linux. Each cluster will use 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors, making for a 10,240 processor array. The system will use a 500-terabyte SGI InfiniteStorage storage area network.

SGI plans to build the system over the next three months. Two nodes are already operational, according to SGI.



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