ASCI Red | 1996
ASCI Red
ASCI Red was the first supercomputer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), which was created to support U.S. government policies regarding nuclear weapons and to assist in maintaining U.S. nuclear arsenals following the 1992 nuclear test moratorium. This computer was installed at Sandia National Laboratories by Intel at the end of 1996, and its design was based on the Intel Paragon computer. ASCI Red was targeted to achieve a performance of 1 teraflop by the end of 1996, and it was expected that by September 1997, it would be able to run ASCI applications using all its memory and nodes. This goal was achieved, and ASCI Red was used by the U.S. government from 1997 to 2005, holding the title of the fastest supercomputer in the world until 2000. ASCI Red was the first supercomputer to exceed 1 teraflop of performance, and subsequent upgrades allowed it to achieve over 2 teraflops of performance. It was also highly praised for its reliability, with Bill Camp, the supervisor at Sandia, stating that ASCI Red had the best reliability among all supercomputers.
ASCI Red was designed as a distributed-memory MIMD (Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data) message-passing computer, providing high scalability in I/O, memory, computation nodes, storage capacity, and communication. Standard parallel interfaces allowed for the porting of parallel applications to the system. The system was divided into four partitions. The computation partition contained nodes optimized for floating-point performance, where the actual computation took place. The service partition acted as a host, supporting system management, application development, and user interactive sessions. The I/O partition supported disk I/O and parallel file systems, while the system partition handled booting and system reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features.
Each partition of ASCI Red was interconnected to form a single supercomputer, but not all nodes supported global shared memory. Each node worked with its own memory, and data between nodes were exchanged through "explicit message passing." The computational nodes in ASCI Red initially contained two 200 MHz Pentium Pro processors, which were later upgraded to two 333 MHz Pentium II Overdrive processors. ASCI Red is also known for being the first large-scale supercomputer built entirely with commercial off-the-shelf components.
ASCI Red occupied 1,600 square feet (about 150 m²) of space and consisted of 104 cabinets. Of these, 76 contained the computers (processors), 8 were switches, and 20 were dedicated to disks. It was equipped with 1,212 GB of RAM and 9,298 individual processors, initially using 200 MHz Pentium Pro processors, later upgraded to 333 MHz Pentium II Xeon processors. The system consumed 850 kW of power and had excellent I/O performance, solving the performance degradation problems seen in previous supercomputers. ASCI Red used Intel's TFLOPS PFS (Parallel File System), which supported up to 1 GB/s data transfer speeds and removed I/O bottlenecks.
In December 1996, ASCI Red set a world record with a performance of 1.06 teraflops and held the title of the fastest supercomputer for several years. By 1999, through processor and memory upgrades, its performance increased to 2.38 teraflops, and subsequent upgrades raised the performance to 3.1 teraflops.
Each partition of ASCI Red ran different operating systems. For example, users worked on an operating system called "Teraflops OS," which was originally developed for the Intel Paragon XP/S supercomputer. The computation partition used a lightweight operating system called "Cougar," developed through collaboration between Sandia Labs and the University of New Mexico. Cougar was based on the PUMA and SUNMOS operating systems and consisted of a lightweight kernel, process control threads, and other utilities.
