ASCI Red (also known as ASCI Option Red or TFLOPS) was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the United States nuclear arsenal after the 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing.
ASCI Red was built by Intel and installed at Sandia National Laboratories in late 1996. The design was based on the Intel Paragon computer. The original goals to deliver a true teraflop machine by the end of 1996 that would be capable of running an ASCI application using all memory and nodes by September 1997 were met.
It was used by the US government from the years of 1997 to 2005 and was the world's fastest supercomputer until late 2000.
ASCI Red was decommissioned in 2006. each with a 32 KB level-1 cache and a 512 KB level-2 cache. According to Intel, the ASCI Red Computer is also the first large scale supercomputer to be built entirely of common commercially available components.
All of ASCI Red's partitions are interconnected to form one supercomputer, however at the same time none of the nodes support global shared memory. Each of the nodes works in its own memory, and each shares data with the others through "explicit message-passing".
Technical specifications
The computer itself took up almost of space,
First to TFLOPS
In December, 1996, three quarters of ASCI Red was measured at a world record 1.06 TFLOPS on MP LINPACK and held the record for fastest supercomputer in the world for several consecutive years, maxing out at 2.38 TFLOPS after a processor and memory upgrade in 1999.