NASA has once again turned to SGI for a massive supercomputer.

The two organizations announced today that SGI will build a whopping 20,480-core system for NASA Ames in Mountain View, California. The giant will run on four-core versions of Intel's Xeon chip and should reach peak performance of 245 Teraflops, which would make it one of the fastest computers in the world. The system, centered around SGI's Altix ICE hardware, will also boast - gulp - 20,800 GB of memory and 450TB of storage.

NASA plans to use this unit to help with jobs related to future manned missions to the moon and for aeronautics and science research.

This system is of particular note because of SGI's past at NASA. A few years back, SGI built a 10,000 processor supercomputer for NASA around Intel's Itanium chips. That computer - dubbed Columbia - was one of the top three boxes in the world during its heyday.

NASA appears to have shunned the Itanic this time around, which makes us wonder if we'll ever see Itanium crack the top ten again.

In addition, SGI and Intel helped NASA out an awful lot on the Columbia box, offering up hardware at a very steep discount. We're waiting to hear how much this system will cost. ®

Related stories

• Rackable Systems slips into SGI's name (11 May 2009)
• Comment SGI's Rackable's future supercomputers (1 April 2009)
• NASA unveils green science commune dream (14 March 2009)
• SGI lays off another 9 per cent (3 March 2009)
• SGI right at home in red ink (7 February 2009)
• SGI slashes 15 per cent of its workforce (15 December 2008)
• SC08 SGI preps supers for future Intel chips (20 November 2008)
• SC08 Supercomputing past masters resurface with coder-friendly cluster (17 November 2008)
• Unisys, SGI - canaries in the coal mines (7 November 2008)
• Sun, Novell, and Cray - Time to go private? (14 October 2008)
• NEC, Appro ink supercomputing pact (16 September 2008)
• IDF Sun double teams Xeon chip (19 August 2008)
• Supercomputer to improve UK weather (6 August 2008)
• NASA: The Moon is not enough (22 July 2008)
• Boffins: Roadrunner hypercomputer could drive a car (13 June 2008)
• Scientists discover galaxy's youngest supernova (14 May 2008)
• NASA confirms manned mission to 10 Petaflops (7 May 2008)
• 'Now that we have a map, let's start colonizing outer space' - expert (17 March 2006)
• IDC's missing Itanium report found at rival analyst firm (24 February 2006)
• SC05 IBM tops supercomputer list again (14 November 2005)
• Shuttle gets permission to land (5 August 2005)
• SGI closes painful 2005 with a thud (29 July 2005)
• NASA's Columbia benchmarks 43 teraflops (27 October 2004)
• NASA splashes out on shiny supercomputer (28 July 2004)