A publication of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Division, NA-121.2, NNSA Defense Programs
December 2008
NA-ASC-500-08—Issue 9
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Red Storm Regains Position in Top 10 Fastest Computers
The prior quarter’s newsletter article, “Red Storm Supercomputer Upgraded to 284 teraFLOPS” http://www.sandia.gov/NNSA/ASC/enews/0908/0908.html reported on the technical features of the latest upgrade to the Red Storm supercomputer.
It described the architectural design that has allowed this machine to evolve and remain viable as hardware technology advances. Since last quarter, a new Top 500 list was published in November. In its new configuration, Red Storm achieved 204.2 teraFLOPS when running the HPL (High Performance Linpack) benchmark. This result moved it from the 12th position to the 9th position in the ranking.
Red Storm is now a mixture of dual and quad core nodes, from two different generations of AMD processors. Extensive testing has shown that for a number of ASC applications, the core performance is interchangeable. As a result, applications can run on a mixture of nodes without introducing a load imbalance. The additional contention for network and memory access in the quad-core processors is mostly offset by enhancements in the quad core processor (increased TLB entries, faster memory subsystem, and increased concurrent floating point operations.)
For more information, please go to: http://www.sandia.gov/ASC/rs-news.html
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