Supercomputers/Systems/ASCI Red
USA · decommissioned · classified
ASCI Red
Operated by Sandia National Laboratories at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 1.07 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.80 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 59.3%
- Cores
- 9,298
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - Intel Supercomputer Systems Division | Intel | - | Reported | computerhistory.orgsandia.gov |
| CPU | Intel Pentium Pro 200 MHz CPUs x86 (P6) · 1C · 0.2 GHz · 350 nm · 35 W Intel Pentium Pro 200 MHz | Intel | 9,298 reported | Reported | computerhistory.orgsandia.gov |
| Interconnect | Intel ASCI Red mesh Interconnect 2D mesh · 400 MB/s per direction Intel custom 2D mesh | Intel | - | Reported | computerhistory.orgsandia.gov |
| Cooling | Air cooling (CRAC/CRAH) Cooling Room-level air handling · Practical ceiling around 15-20 kW per rack air cooled | Intel | - | Reported | computerhistory.orgsandia.gov |
| Operating system | Cougar Operating systems Custom lightweight kernel, no Unix layer · Open source, government-authored Sandia-developed lightweight kernel (Cougar) on the Compute nodes | Sandia National Laboratories | - | Reported | osti.gov |
The read
The first teraflop system, and the moment the industry's bill of materials changed permanently. ASCI Red was built from roughly nine thousand Intel Pentium Pro processors (commodity desktop silicon) rather than custom vector parts. Intel's Supercomputer Systems Division was wound down shortly afterwards, so the integrator role and the CPU role, which sat with the same company here, have had no common owner since. Stockpile stewardship workload; details of what it actually ran remain classified.
Timeline
- 1993 Announced source
- 1997-06 List debut at #1 (June 1997) source
- 1997-06 First operational source
- 2006 Decommissioned source
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque
- Location
- Albuquerque, NM, USA
- Cooling
- Chilled water
- Commissioned
- 1990
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| computerhistory.org | names system and part | Intel Pentium Pro 200 MHz, Intel ASCI Red mesh |
| sandia.gov | does not name this system | - |
Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
Power and cooling
Why air ran out at 20 kW a rack, how warm-water cooling removes the chillers, and what PUE conceals.
Inside a node
Latency-optimised versus throughput-optimised processors, NUMA, and the end of the host-to-device copy.
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.