ASCI Red
| Active | Two-Thirds Operational March 1997, Fully Operational June 1997, decommissioned 2006 |
|---|---|
| Sponsors | Intel Corporation |
| Operators | Sandia National Laboratories, US Department of Energy |
| Location | Sandia National Laboratories, United States |
| Power | 850 kW |
| Operating system | Cougar / TOS (a Mach (kernel) derivative) |
| Space | 1,600 sq ft (150 m2) |
| Memory | 1212 gigabytes |
| Speed | 1.3 teraflops (peak) |
| Ranking | TOP500: 1, June 2000 |
| Purpose | nuclear materials testing, other |
| Legacy | First Supercomputer to achieve over 1.0 teraflops on LINPACK test |
| Web site | https://web.archive.org/web/20110926225845/http://www.sandia.gov/ASCI/Red/ |
ASCI Red (also known as ASCI Option Red or TFLOPS) was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the United States nuclear arsenal after the 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing.
ASCI Red was built by Intel and installed at Sandia National Laboratories in late 1996. The design was based on the Intel Paragon computer. The original goals to deliver a true teraflop machine by the end of 1996 that would be capable of running an ASCI application using all memory and nodes by September 1997 were met. It was used by the US government from the years of 1997 to 2005 and was the world's fastest supercomputer until late 2000. It was the first ASCI machine that the Department of Energy acquired, and also the first supercomputer to score above one teraflops on the LINPACK benchmark, a test that measures a computer's calculation speed. Later upgrades to ASCI Red allowed it to perform above two teraflops.
ASCI Red earned a reputation for reliability that some veterans say has never been beaten. Sandia director Bill Camp said that ASCI Red had the best reliability of any supercomputer ever built, and “was supercomputing’s high-water mark in longevity, price, and performance.”
ASCI Red was decommissioned in 2006.
The ASCI Red supercomputer was a distributed memory MIMD (Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data) message-passing computer. The design provided high degrees of scalability for I/O, memory, compute nodes, storage capacity, and communications; standard parallel interfaces also made it possible to port parallel applications to the machine. The machine was structured into four partitions: Compute, Service, I/O, and System. Parallel applications executed in the Compute Partition which contained nodes optimized for floating point performance. The compute nodes had only the features required for efficient computation – they were not purposed for general interactive services. The Service Partition provided an integrated, scalable host that supported interactive users (log-in sessions), application development, and system administration. The I/O Partition supported disk I/O, a scalable parallel file system and network services. The System Partition supported initial booting and system Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) capabilities.
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