Cray Inc. President and Chief Executive Officer Peter Ungaro did not stint in his praise. He told the assembled group, “Without Red Storm I wouldn’t be here in front of you today. Virtually everything we do at Cray — each of our three business units — comes from Red Storm. It spawned a company around it, a historic company struggling as to where we would go next. Literally, this program saved Cray.”
Red Storm’s design and its descendants have racked up more than a billion dollars in sales for the company, he said.
Among the machine’s advances was its use of off-the-shelf parts, which made it cheaper to build, repair and upgrade. Red Storm was air-cooled instead of water-cooled, so parts could be replaced and upgrades completed while the machine was running. The only custom component was the Interconnect chip that made it possible to pass information more directly from processor to processor while applications were running. High-memory bandwidth kept the processors from being starved for data.
And its architecture was upgradeable, from a theoretical peak at birth of 41.47 teraflops in 2005 to 124.42 teraflops in 2006 to 284.16 teraflops in 2008, because (among other reasons) the machine accommodated single-, dual- and quad-core processors that eventually reached 12,920 in number.
Among the machine’s technical achievements was the operation in 2008 known as Burnt Frost, in which Red Storm programmed a 152-inch rocket to shoot down an errant satellite traveling at 17,000 miles per hour, 153 miles above the earth.
For months, Red Storm calculated a large number of shoot-down scenarios, until Sandians were ready to brief then-President George W. Bush on his options.
The result: after the successful take-down with no collateral damage, a military commander exulted, “We can hit a spot on a bullet with a bullet.”
Red Storm’s role, classified for several years, was made known when DoD released the information, followed by a Sandia impact video with a sound track that opened oracularly, “This IS rocket science!”
