Red Storm (computing)

Red Storm was a supercomputer architecture designed for the United States Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. Sandia National Laboratories supplied the architectural specifications and Cray developed the machine in 2004; the design was later sold commercially as the Cray XT3. It was a partitioned, tightly coupled, massively parallel machine with a high performance three dimensional mesh network. The processors were commodity AMD Opteron chips, and SeaStar, a network interface and router chip built around a PowerPC 440 core, was the only custom ASIC in the system. The initial installation in 2005 used 10,880 single-core 2.0 GHz Opterons in 140 cabinets, and it was upgraded in 2006 and again in 2008. It ranked sixth on the TOP500 list in November 2005 and second in November 2006, and it was decommissioned in 2012.