A publication of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Division, NA-121.2, NNSA Defense Programs
September 2008
NA-ASC-500-08—Issue 8
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Red Storm Supercomputer Upgraded to 284 teraFLOPS
Located at Sandia, Red Storm is undergoing its second large-scale upgrade in four years of active duty. Sixty-five of the 135 compute cabinets are being upgraded from dual-core to quad-core Opteron processors by swapping dual-core modules for newer, quad-core boards. Processing power will increase from a theoretical maximum of 124 teraFLOPS to 284 teraFLOPS across 38,400 cores (12,960 nodes). To hold the computational results, roughly 1.5 petabytes of disk space are being deployed. A corresponding memory upgrade will provide 2 gigabytes of memory per core across the entire machine.
Throughout this upgrade, the system has remained operational with only brief interruptions for testing and emplacing new modules.
Since 2004, Red Storm has increased in performance from 40 to 284 teraFLOPS given an investment of 20% over the original cost of the machine, and with essentially no change in the power requirements. Created by Sandia engineers, the Red Storm design, continues to show its excellent architectural foundation.
Pictured below are the older dual-core and newer quad-core modules, showing that the basic architecture remains the same, while the implementation improves.
Original XT3 Compute Module
New XT4 Compute Module
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