Named in honor of the crew who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, it increased NASA's supercomputing capacity ten-fold for the agency's science, aeronautics and exploration programs.

Missions run on Columbia include high-fidelity simulations of the Space Shuttle vehicle and launch systems, hurricane track prediction, global ocean circulation, and the physics of supernova detonations.

[1] Columbia debuted as the second most powerful supercomputer on the TOP500 list in November 2004 at a LINPACK rating of 51.87 teraflops, or 51.87 trillion floating point calculations per second.

[3] It was originally composed of 20 interconnected SGI Altix 3700 512-processor multi-rack systems running SUSE Linux Enterprise, using Intel Itanium 2 Montecito and Montvale processors.

[7] It was slowly phased out as its successors at NAS, the petascale Pleiades supercomputer and the Endeavour shared-memory system, expanded to meet with NASA's growing high-end computing needs.