NASA's Columbia Supercomputer is World's Fastest

NASA, SGI and Intel Achieve Record Performance on 10,240-CPU Altix System Deployed at NASA Ames

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., (October 26, 2004)—Silicon Graphics (NYSE: SGI) with NASA today confirmed that NASA's new Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based Columbia supercomputer is the most powerful computer in the world. Only days after NASA completed installation of Columbia—and using just 16 of Columbia's 20 installed systems—the new supercomputer achieved sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second (teraflops), eclipsing the performance of every supercomputer operating today.