ASCI Red or ASCI Option Red, is a supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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 detonation testing following the moratorium on testing started by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 and extended by Bill Clinton in 1993. ASCI Red became operational in 1997.

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, using Intel's distributed version of unix originally created for Intel's Paragon XP/S Supercomputer. The compute partition is managed by Intel's Cougar very light-weight operating system which traces its heritage back to the SUNMOS system of the Paragon computer.

External links

ASCI Red Facts (http://www.sandia.gov/ASCI/Red/RedFacts.htm) Top500 Supercomputer Sites (http://www.top500.org)