Sandia boosts supercomputer performance to 125 teraflops with Cray Inc.

TAMPA, Fla., 17 Nov. 2006. Cray Inc. has announced that Sandia National Laboratories has upgraded its "Red Storm" supercomputer by boosting performance from 40 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second) to 125 teraflops, making Red Storm one of the highest performing supercomputers in the world.

The upgrade included the addition of a fifth row of cabinets and upgrading the entire system with dual-core AMD Opteron(TM) processors, resulting in a supercomputer with a total of over 25,000 processor cores. Dual-core technology fits two processor cores on a single die, doubling processing capacity with minimal impact on power consumption and heat levels.

Sandia and Cray co-designed Red Storm as part of a contract under the National Nuclear Security Agency's Advanced Simulation & Computing program. The Red Storm design became the basis for the Cray XT3 massively parallel processor (MPP) supercomputer.