ASCI Red

ASCI Red (also known as ASCI Option Red or TFLOPS) was the first computer built under the Advanced 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. It was the first ASCI machine that the Department of Energy acquired, and also the first supercomputer to score above one teraflops on the LINPACK benchmark, a test that measures a computers calculation speed. Later upgrades to ASCI Red allowed it to perform above two teraflops.

ASCI Red earned a reputation for reliability that some veterans say has never been beat. Sandia director Bill Camp said that ASCI Red had the best reliability of any supercomputer ever built, and “was supercomputing’s high-water mark in longevity, price, and performance.”

ASCI Red was decommissioned in 2006.