Red Storm (computing)
| Company type | Architecture / Supercomputer system |
|---|---|
| Industry | Supercomputing |
| Founded | 2004 |
| Founder | Cray, Inc |
| Defunct | 2012 |
| Fate | Retired from service |
Area served | United States (US Department of Energy) |
Key people | Sandia National Laboratories (design criteria) |
| Products | Cray XT3 (marketed system based on Red Storm architecture) |
Red Storm represented a supercomputer architecture created by Cray, Inc in 2004, developed for the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program, following design criteria from Sandia National Laboratories. This system was subsequently marketed as the Cray XT3.
The architecture of Red Storm employed a partitioned, space-shared, tightly integrated design optimized for massively parallel processing, featuring a high-speed 3D mesh interconnect. It utilized standard AMD Opteron processors and commercially available memory DIMM modules. The sole proprietary element was the SeaStar network interface controller/router, which was built around a PowerPC 440 core. When first commissioned in 2005, the system contained 10,880 single-core 2.0 GHz Opteron CPUs—10,368 allocated for computational tasks and 512 reserved for system oversight—distributed across 140 cabinets occupying .
Engineered for scalability from a single cabinet to hundreds, Red Storm experienced two significant enhancements. In 2006, it was upgraded with 2.4 GHz Dual-Core Opterons and expanded beyond 26,000 cores, reaching a peak computing power of 124.4 teraflops (with a Linpack benchmark result of 101.4 teraflops). The 2008 update integrated technology from the Cray XT4, adopting quad-core Opterons paired with 2 GB of memory per core, enabling a theoretical maximum performance of 284 teraflops.
Red Storm’s standings on the Top500 list were as follows:
- November 2005: 6th place (36.19 TFLOPS)
- November 2006: 2nd place (101.4 TFLOPS)
- November 2008: 9th place (204.2 TFLOPS)
The system was designed primarily for capability computing, which involves executing single applications across the entire machine and demands balanced capabilities in processing power, memory bandwidth, and network throughput. Its software environment included the scalable Portals network programming interface and a specialized lightweight kernel called Catamount, which evolved from ASCI Red’s SUNMOS "Cougar." Additionally, a userspace adaptation of the Lustre file system (liblustre) was customized for Catamount to offer POSIX-like behavior while minimizing latency fluctuations.
Red Storm was retired from service in 2012.