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ASCI Red or ASCI Option Red, was a supercomputer
Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation , and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research....
 installed at Sandia National Laboratories
Sandia National Laboratories

Sandia National Laboratories, which is managed and operated by the Sandia Corporation , is a major United States Department of Energy research and development United States Department of Energy National Labs with two locations, one in Albuquerque, New Mexico, New Mexico and the other in Livermore, California, California....
, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico

Albuquerque is the largest List of cities in the United States in the US state of New Mexico, United States. It is the county seat of Bernalillo County, New Mexico and is situated in the central part of the state, straddling the Rio Grande....
. ASCI Red became operational in 1997 and was retired from service in September, 2005. It was the fastest computer on the TOP500
TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year....
 list from June 1997 to June 2000. It was decommissioned in 2006.

The project was a collaboration between Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation is the world's largest semiconductor company and the inventor of the X86 architecture series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers....
 and Sandia Labs. It was built as stage one of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) by the United States Department of Energy
United States Department of Energy

The United States Department of Energy is a United States Cabinet-level department of the United States government of the United States responsible for Energy policy of the United States and nuclear safety....
 and the National Nuclear Security Administration
National Nuclear Security Administration

The United States National Nuclear Security Administration is part of the United States Department of Energy. It works to improve national security through the military application of nuclear energy....
 to build a simulator to replace live nuclear weapon detonation following the moratorium on underground testing started by President
President

President is a title held by many leaders of organizations, company, trade unions, university, and country. Etymology, a "president" is one who Wiktionary:Preside, who sits in leadership ....
 George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush

George Herbert Walker Bush served as the List of Presidents of the United States President of the United States from 1989 to 1993. Bush held a variety of political positions prior to his presidency, including Vice President of the United States in the administration of Ronald Reagan and Director of Central Intelligence under Gerald R....
 in 1992 and extended by President
President

President is a title held by many leaders of organizations, company, trade unions, university, and country. Etymology, a "president" is one who Wiktionary:Preside, who sits in leadership ....
 Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton served as the List of Presidents of the United States President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He was the fifteenth Democrat elected to that office....
 in 1993.

It was a mesh-based (38 X 32 X 2) MIMD
MIMD

In computing, MIMD is a technique employed to achieve parallelism. Machines using MIMD have a number of processors that function Asynchrony and independently....
 massively-parallel processing machine initially consisting of 4,510 compute nodes, 1212 gigabyte
Gigabyte

Gigabyte is an SI prefix-multiple of the unit byte for Computer data storage. Since the giga- prefix means 109, gigabyte means 1,000,000,000 bytes ....
s of total distributed memory and 12.5 terabyte
Terabyte

A terabyte is a measurement term for computer storage. The value of a terabyte based upon a decimal radix is defined as one 1000000000000 bytes, or 1000 gigabytes....
s of disk storage.






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ASCI Red or ASCI Option Red, was a supercomputer
Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation , and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research....
 installed at Sandia National Laboratories
Sandia National Laboratories

Sandia National Laboratories, which is managed and operated by the Sandia Corporation , is a major United States Department of Energy research and development United States Department of Energy National Labs with two locations, one in Albuquerque, New Mexico, New Mexico and the other in Livermore, California, California....
, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico

Albuquerque is the largest List of cities in the United States in the US state of New Mexico, United States. It is the county seat of Bernalillo County, New Mexico and is situated in the central part of the state, straddling the Rio Grande....
. ASCI Red became operational in 1997 and was retired from service in September, 2005. It was the fastest computer on the TOP500
TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year....
 list from June 1997 to June 2000. It was decommissioned in 2006.

The project was a collaboration between Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation is the world's largest semiconductor company and the inventor of the X86 architecture series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers....
 and Sandia Labs. It was built as stage one of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) by the United States Department of Energy
United States Department of Energy

The United States Department of Energy is a United States Cabinet-level department of the United States government of the United States responsible for Energy policy of the United States and nuclear safety....
 and the National Nuclear Security Administration
National Nuclear Security Administration

The United States National Nuclear Security Administration is part of the United States Department of Energy. It works to improve national security through the military application of nuclear energy....
 to build a simulator to replace live nuclear weapon detonation following the moratorium on underground testing started by President
President

President is a title held by many leaders of organizations, company, trade unions, university, and country. Etymology, a "president" is one who Wiktionary:Preside, who sits in leadership ....
 George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush

George Herbert Walker Bush served as the List of Presidents of the United States President of the United States from 1989 to 1993. Bush held a variety of political positions prior to his presidency, including Vice President of the United States in the administration of Ronald Reagan and Director of Central Intelligence under Gerald R....
 in 1992 and extended by President
President

President is a title held by many leaders of organizations, company, trade unions, university, and country. Etymology, a "president" is one who Wiktionary:Preside, who sits in leadership ....
 Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton served as the List of Presidents of the United States President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He was the fifteenth Democrat elected to that office....
 in 1993.

It was a mesh-based (38 X 32 X 2) MIMD
MIMD

In computing, MIMD is a technique employed to achieve parallelism. Machines using MIMD have a number of processors that function Asynchrony and independently....
 massively-parallel processing machine initially consisting of 4,510 compute nodes, 1212 gigabyte
Gigabyte

Gigabyte is an SI prefix-multiple of the unit byte for Computer data storage. Since the giga- prefix means 109, gigabyte means 1,000,000,000 bytes ....
s of total distributed memory and 12.5 terabyte
Terabyte

A terabyte is a measurement term for computer storage. The value of a terabyte based upon a decimal radix is defined as one 1000000000000 bytes, or 1000 gigabytes....
s of disk storage. The original incarnation of this machine used Intel Pentium Pro
Pentium Pro

The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86-based microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel introduced in November 1995. It introduced the Intel P6 and was originally intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications....
 processors, each clocked at 200 MHz. These were later upgraded to Pentium II
Pentium II

The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture and x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997....
 OverDrive
Pentium OverDrive

The Pentium OverDrive was a microprocessor marketing brand name used by Intel, to cover a variety of consumer upgrade products sold in the mid 1990s....
 processors. The system was upgraded to a total of 9298 Pentium II OverDrive processors, each clocked at 333 MHz. It consisted of 104 cabinets, taking up about 2500 square feet (230 mē). The system was designed to use commodity mass-market components and to be very scalable.

The original ASCI Red was the first computer on Earth to rate above 1 teraFLOPS
FLOPS

In computing, FLOPS is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. The FLOPS is a measure of a computer's computer performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations, similar to instructions per second....
 on the MP-Linpack
LINPACK

LINPACK is a software library_ for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Pete Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s....
 benchmark (1996), as noted in Top500 Supercomputer sites. After being upgraded with Pentium II Overdrive processors, the computer demonstrated sustained MP-Linpack benchmarks above 2 teraFLOPS.

Different partitions of the machine used different operating systems. To the programmer, it appeared as a normal Unix
Unix

Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of American Telephone & Telegraph employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna....
 machine, running "Teraflops OS", Intel's distributed OSF/1 AD-based system originally developed for the Paragon XP/S
Intel Paragon

The Intel Paragon was a series of massively parallel supercomputers produced by Intel. The Paragon XP/S was a productized version of the experimental Touchstone Delta system built at Caltech, launched in 1992....
 supercomputer. The compute partition processors ran Sandia's very light-weight "Cougar" operating system which traces its heritage back to the SUNMOS
SUNMOS

SUNMOS is an operating system jointly developed by Sandia National Laboratories and the Computer Science Department at the University of New Mexico....
 kernel developed for the compute nodes of the Paragon.

A portion of ASCI Red is in the permanent collection of The Computer History Museum
Computer History Museum

The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, when The Computer Museum, Boston sent the majority of its historical collection to Moffett Federal Airfield, so that TCM could concentrate on computing-related exhibits for children....
 in Mountain View, California
Mountain View, California

Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, in the U.S. state of California. The city gets its name from the views of the Santa Cruz Mountains....
.

External links