Red Storm (computing)

Article summary

Red Storm was a supercomputer architecture designed for the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. Cray, Inc developed it in 2004 based on the contracted architectural specifications provided by Sandia National Laboratories. The architecture was later commercially produced as the Cray XT3. Red Storm was a partitioned, space shared, tightly coupled, massively parallel processing machine with a high performance 3D mesh network. The processors were commodity AMD Opteron CPUs with off-the-shelf memory DIMMs. The NIC/router combination, called SeaStar, was the only custom ASIC component in the system and used a PowerPC 440 based core. When deployed in 2005, Red Storm’s initial configuration consisted of 10,880 single-core 2.0 GHz Opterons, of which 10,368 were dedicated for scientific calculations. The remaining 512 Opterons were used to service the computations and also provide the user interface to the system and run a version of Linux. This initial installation consisted of 140 cabinets, taking up of floor space. The Red Storm supercomputer was designed to be highly scalable from a single cabinet to hundreds of cabinets and was scaled up twice during its lifetime. In 2006 the system was upgraded to 2.4 GHz Dual-Core Opterons.…

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