ASCI Red

ASCI Red
ActiveTwo-Thirds Operational March 1997, Fully Operational June 1997,[1] decommissioned 2006[2]
SponsorsIntel Corporation[1]
OperatorsSandia National Laboratories, US Department of Energy
LocationSandia National Laboratories, United States
Power850 kW
Operating systemCougar / TOS (a Mach kernel derivative)
Space1,600 sq ft (150 m2)[3]
Memory1212 gigabytes
Speed1.3 teraflops (peak)[1]
RankingTOP500: 1, June 2000[4]
Purposenuclear materials testing, other
LegacyFirst Supercomputer to achieve over 1.0 teraflops on LINPACK test
Websiteweb.archive.org

ASCI Red (also known as ASCI Option Red or TFLOPS) was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI),[5][6] 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.[7] It was used by the US government from the years of 1997 to 2005 and was the world's fastest supercomputer until late 2000.[4][6] It was the first ASCI machine that the Department of Energy acquired,[6] 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.” [8]

ASCI Red was decommissioned in 2006.[2]

  1. ^ a b c Thomas, Robert. "ASCI Red Homepage". Sandia National Laboratories. Archived from the original on September 26, 2011. Retrieved October 30, 2011.
  2. ^ a b "Sandia's ASCI Red, world's first teraflop supercomputer, is decommissioned". sandia.gov. June 29, 2006. Archived from the original on September 29, 2013. Retrieved May 26, 2014.
  3. ^ Mattson, Timothy. "An Overview of the Intel TFLOPS Supercompute" (PDF). MIT. Retrieved October 30, 2011.
  4. ^ a b "TOP500.org Ranking History for ASCI Red". TOP500 Supercomputer Sites. Retrieved October 29, 2011.
  5. ^ Mattson, Timothy. "The ASCI Option Red Supercomputer". Archived from the original on May 28, 2010. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  6. ^ a b c Garg, Sharad (2001). "Performance Evaluation of Parallel File Systems for PC Clusters and ASCI Red". Proceedings 2001 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing. IEEE. pp. 172–177. doi:10.1109/CLUSTR.2001.959973. ISBN 0-7695-1116-3. S2CID 13224481.
  7. ^ "7X Performance Results – Final Report: ASCI Red vs. Red Storm" (PDF). Retrieved November 17, 2011.
  8. ^ "Sandia's ASCI Red, world's first teraflop supercomputer, is decommissioned" (PDF). Retrieved January 8, 2013.

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