40 Tflop/s Red Storm to replace ASCI Red as Sandia's fastest supercomputerSeattle 21 October 2002 The US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories and Cray have finalized a multiyear contract, valued at approximately $90 million, under which Cray will collaborate with Sandia to develop and deliver a new massively parallel processing (MPP) supercomputer called Red Storm. Red Storm will peak at 40 Tflop/s, and have AMD processors.
Cray will deliver a system with theoretical peak performance of 40 Tflop/s. Red Storm is expected to become operational in fiscal year 2004, and will use the upcoming Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Opteron processors connected via a low-latency, high-bandwidth, three-dimensional mesh interconnect network based on HyperTransport technology. This system is expected to be at least seven times more powerful than Sandia's current ASCI Red supercomputer on actual weapons problems. ASCI Red was the first supercomputer delivered under the US ASCI program.
"Sandia selected Cray to build this design because of their commitment to engineering, building, and delivering efficient, cost-effective and reliable large-scale MPP systems," said Sandia's Bill Camp, Director of Computers, Computation, Information and Mathematics. Camp also said that Cray's commitment to developing balanced and cost-effective architectures, together with its focus on the scientific computing market, were key factors. MPP supercomputers, designed as single machines, are more efficient than "clustered" systems that more loosely link together multiple servers or PCs. "We expect to get substantially more real work done, at a lower overall cost, on a highly balanced system like Red Storm than on a large-scale cluster," Camp said.
Jim Tomkins, a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Sandia, and Camp architected the Red Storm design. Sandia's design was strongly influenced by the successes of the Cray T3E and ASCI Red MPP supercomputers. According to Tomkins, "The Red Storm contract contains an option to upgrade to 60 teraOPS. The Red Storm system architecture is designed to scale to hundreds of teraOPS."
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