- ASCI Thor's Hammer
Thor's Hammer is the first
supercomputer using the Red Storm architecture. In 2004, the computer was installed atSandia National Laboratories inAlbuquerque, New Mexico . The project is a collaboration betweenCray and Sandia Labs.It is a 3-dimensional mesh-based
MIMD machine consisting of 10,368 compute nodes, 10 TB of total distributed memory and 240 TB of disk storage. The system usesAMD 64-bitOpteron CPUs as processing nodes and PowerPC 440 based communication processors called SeaStar. The system consists of 140 cabinets, taking up 3000 square feet (280 m²).The system consists of two partitions: a compute partition and a service partition. Compute nodes run a very light-weight operating system called "Catamount", which is based on the operating system of
ASCI Red called "Cougar". Service partitions run a version ofLinux .The system is meant to be a replacement for the earlier
ASCI Red . The system as initially delivered had a theoretical peak of 40 TeraFLOPS , but after a CPU upgrade to dual core Opteron 2.6 GHz in 2006 it was able to achieve 101.4 TFLOPS to place it at number 3 on the June 2007Top 500 .It was built as stage of the
Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) started by theUnited States Department of Energy and theNational Nuclear Security Administration to build a simulator to replace livenuclear testing following the moratorium on testing started byPresident George H. W. Bush in1992 and extended byBill Clinton in1993 .Cray Inc. offers a commercial version of the system known as the
Cray XT3 .External links
* [http://www.sandia.gov/ASC/pubs_pres/pubs/RS_flyer.pdf Red Storm fact sheet]
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