ACADEMIA

NASA is extending access to Columbia, its premier high-end computing system, to researchers from outside existing NASA projects. Columbia, a 10,240-processor SGI Altix supercomputer, is located at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA. "NASA is committed to maintaining U.S. leadership in high-end scientific and technical computing and computational modeling," said John McManus, Deputy Chief Information Officer and Chair of the Columbia Board of Directors at NASA Headquarters. "Expanding availability of Columbia is part of our contribution to implementing the 2004 Federal Plan for High-End Computing." Performing 51.9 trillion floating-point operations (teraflops) on the LINPACK benchmark, Columbia currently ranks #3 internationally on the TOP500 supercomputer sites list. The system consists of twenty 512-processor nodes. NASA recently linked four of Columbia's nodes to form a unique 2,048-processor shared-memory environment--currently the world's largest "single-system-image" configuration. This 2,048-processor environment serves as NASA's National Leadership Computing System (NLCS). The agency joins the Department of Energy in making leadership-class computing resources available to the broader U.S. research community. NASA is allocating 4.5 million processor-hours per year (5 percent of the total Columbia resource) to non-NASA scientists and engineers. The agency seeks computationally intensive research projects of large scale that can make high-impact scientific or engineering advances through the use of a large allocation of Columbia system time and data storage. Allocations will not be limited to just the NLCS portion of Columbia. Proposals should be for a one-year allocation and may include an option for a second year. NASA anticipates making four to eight large awards. Proposals will be rated and ranked by a panel of program managers and discipline scientists assembled from several federal agencies, along with other invited experts. The ranking will include computer science relevance (weighted more heavily), followed by computational technology and potential scientific or engineering impact. Final decisions regarding allocations will be made by NASA's Columbia Board of Directors. The submission deadline is midnight EDT Monday, January 16, 2006. The full call for proposals and online submission system are available at: its Web site. More information about the Columbia facility is available at: its Web site.