High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Named in honor of the crew who died in the Columbia disaster, Columbia is a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics for NASA. Its main purpose was to simulate the violent collision and merger of spiral galaxies that lead to the formation of elliptical galaxies. It is connected to the NASA Research and Engineering Network and was installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility in 2004. According to the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers, it entered the list in November 2004 at position 2, running at 51.87 teraflops, or 51.87 trillion floating point calculations per second. By June 2007 it had dropped to position 13, and by June 2008 was at position 25.