The United States space agency NASA has unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer at its Ames Research Centre in California, where India-born astronaut Kalpana Chawla worked for years, in honour of the seven crew members of spacecraft Columbia which crashed last year. Dubbed 'Project Columbia', the $50 million computer built by Silicon Graphics Inc. is composed of 10,240 processors in 20 units, making it one of the world's most powerful supercomputing systems.
The system, which was unveiled on Tuesday, was built and installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility at Ames in less than 120 days. Silicon Graphics also claimed that NASA's new Intel Itanium 2 processor-based Columbia supercomputer is the most powerful computer in the world. The new supercomputer achieved sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second (teraflops), eclipsing the performance of every supercomputer operating today.
News source: rediff.com
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