An Overview of the Intel TFLOPS Supercomputer

Computer simulations needed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) greatly exceed the capacity of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. To satisfy this need, the DOE created the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). This program accelerates the development of new scalable supercomputers and will lead to a supercomputer early in the next century that can run at a rate of 100 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS). Intel built the first computer in this program, the ASCI Option Red Supercomputer (also known as the Intel TFLOPS supercomputer). This system has over 4500 nodes, 594 Gbytes of RAM, and two independent 1 Tbyte disk systems. Late in the spring of 1997, we set the MP LINPACK world record of 1.34 TFLOPS. In this paper, we give an overview of the ASCI Option Red Supercomputer. The motivation for building this supercomputer is presented and the hardware and software views of the machine are described in detail. We also briefly discuss what it is like to use the machine.