Red Storm

Red Storm is a new Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) computer designed to scale from a single cabinet and relatively few processors to hundreds of cabinets and thousands of processors. The system uses high production volume commodity processors combined with a very high performance 3-D mesh interconnect to produce high parallel efficiency on a broad spectrum of scientific and engineering applications and has an excellent price/performance ratio.

Red Storm was developed jointly by Cray Inc., and the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Sandia National Laboratories. It was installed at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM, in the winter of 2004.

The installation at Sandia operates in a dual network—classified (Red) and unclassified (Black)—configuration. The machine can be rapidly reconfigured to make all the compute nodes classified, all the compute nodes unclassified, or, in normal operation, three-quarters of the compute nodes available to either of the two networks and one-quarter of the machine available to the other network.

• 124.42 teraOPS theoretical peak performance
• 135 compute node cabinets
  20 service and I/O node cabinets
  20 Red/Black switch cabinets
• 12,960 compute node processors, 320 + 320 service and I/O node processors
• AMD Opteron™ 2.4 GHz dual core processors
• 40 terabytes of DDR memory
• 340 terabytes of disk storage
• Linux/Catamount Operating Systems
• Approximately 3500 ft2 including disk systems
• <2.5 megawatts of power and cooling