ASCI Red
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ASCI Red or ASCI Option Red, is a supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. On June 29, 2006, Sandia National Laboratories announced that ASCI Red was being decommissioned.
The project was a collaboration between Intel corporation and Sandia Labs, as part of the U.S. Government's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI).
It was built as stage one of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) by the United States Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration to build a simulator to replace live nuclear weapon detonation following the moratorium on underground testing started by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 and extended by President Bill Clinton in 1993. ASCI Red became operational in 1997. ASCI Red was retired from service in September, 2005 at the conclusion of government fiscal year 2005.
It is a mesh-based (38 X 32 X 2) MIMD massively-parallel processing machine consisting of 4,510 compute nodes, 1212 gigabyte of total distributed memory and 12.5 terabyte of disk storage. The original incarnation of this machine used Intel Pentium Pro processors, each clocked at 200 MHz. These were later upgraded to Pentium II OverDrive processors. The current system has a total of 9298 Pentium II OverDrive processors, each clocked at 333 MHz. The system consists of 104 cabinets, taking up about 2500 square feet (230 m²). The system was designed to use commodity mass-market components and to be very scalable.
The original ASCI Red is notable for being the first computer on Earth to bench above 1 TeraFLOPS on the MP-Linpack benchmark (1996), as noted in Top500 Supercomputer sites. After being upgraded with Pentium II Overdrive processors, the computer has demonstrated sustained MP-Linpack benchmarks above 2 TeraFLOPS.
Different partitions of the machine use different operating systems. To the programmer, it looks like a normal Unix machine, running "Teraflops OS", Intel's distributed OSF/1 AD-based system originally developed for the Paragon XP/S supercomputer. The compute partition processors run Sandia's very light-weight "Cougar" operating system which traces its heritage back to the SUNMOS kernel developed for the compute nodes of the Paragon.
