Commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration to address computing and simulation requirements, Cray and Sandia National Laboratories jointly produced the Red Storm supercomputer system. Red Storm is a massively parallel processing (MPP) supercomputer with distributed memory, multiple instruction, and multiple data (MIMD) architecture to provide exceptional
computational power. It is not only one of the world's fastest supercomputers, but offers ease of use, system balance, sustained performance, and reliability.

Red Storm can scale from a single cabinet to hundreds of cabinets—ranging up to tens of thousands of processors. The system combines high volume commodity processors, a very high performance 3D mesh interconnect system, and carefully engineered software to produce high parallel efficiency on a wide variety of scientific and engineering applications. Red Storm leverages the knowledge gained from years of supercomputing experience with successful systems, such as the ASCI Red and the Cray T3E™ supercomputers.

In addition to meeting system scalability, reliability and resiliency requirements, one of Red Storm's main goals is achieving performance balance between processor speed, amount of memory, bandwidth to and from memory, communications bandwidth between processors, system bandwidth, and aggregate I/O bandwidth.

• Highly scalable system software that scales up with the hardware
• 40 TeraOps (at two operations per cycle), able to reach 180 TeraOps with expansion and upgrades
• Minimum aggregate system memory bandwidth of 55TB/sec.
• High speed, high bandwidth, 3D, mesh-based Cray interconnect with minimum sustained aggregate interconnect bandwidth of 100TB/sec
• The ability to run full-system applications for a minimum of 50 hours without failures
• Flexible partitioning for classified and unclassified computing.
• High-performance I/O subsystem (minimum sustained file system bandwidth of 100GB/sec to 240TB of parallel disk storage and sustained external network bandwidth of 50GB/sec)

Cray developed the Cray XT3™ and Cray XT4™ supercomputer systems based on the Red Storm architecture. Designed to be efficient and cost-effective for challenging problems and workloads, the Cray XT4 and Cray XT3 systems address the computing community's need for highly scalable, microprocessor-based supercomputers with high bandwidth. Even in very large systems with thousands of processors, Red Storm and its resulting MPP systems are designed to function as a single high-efficiency computer.