74 International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies, 1(2), 74-93, April-June 2010 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Keywords: High-Performance Computing, Large-Scale Computers, Massively Parallel Processor, Multiprocessing Systems, Parallel Processing Systems, Supercomputers INTRODUCTION In 2001, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Na- tional Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) commissioned Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) to obtain new computational capabil- ity to address mission needs for very high-end computation. After a Request For Information (RFI) failed to provide proposed architectures that met the application scalability and cost The Red Storm Architecture and Early Experiences with Multi-Core Processors James L. Tomkins, Sandia National Laboratories, USA Ron Brightwell, Sandia National Laboratories, USA William J. Camp, Sandia National Laboratories, USA Sudip Dosanjh, Sandia National Laboratories, USA Suzanne M. Kelly, Sandia National Laboratories, USA Paul T. Lin, Sandia National Laboratories, USA Courtenay T. Vaughan, Sandia National Laboratories USA John Levesque, Cray Inc., USA Vinod Tipparaju, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA ABSTRACT The Red Storm architecture, which was conceived by Sandia National Laboratories and implemented by Cray, Inc., has become the basis for most successful line of commercial supercomputers in history. The success of the Red Storm architecture is due largely to the ability to effectively and efficiently solve a wide range of science and engineering problems. The Cray XT series of machines that embody the Red Storm architecture have al- lowed for unprecedented scaling and performance of parallel applications spanning many areas of scientific computing. This paper describes the fundamental characteristics of the architecture and its implementation that have enabled this success, even through successive generations of hardware and software. DOI: 10.4018/jdst.2010040105